by
LARRY THORNTON
Once I stopped smiling over the invitation--feeling pretty smug and pleased with myself--a sense of fear set in. Now you might think that I engage in hyperbole when I mention fear, but let me assure you that I am not posturing here. This is my 11th year as a member of the Hanover College faculty and in those years I have stood in front of many classes with little sense of apprehension (except on day one of each term), but this forum differs considerably from the classroom podiums upon which I have leaned. The classroom setting carries its own safety net--I am the "expert", my subject set, and my audience "novices." Tonight the safety net is less evident. Now I could replicate the classroom with a stunning, tightly woven, historically-based lecture on the 1930s, Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union but the tradition of Mortar Board Last Lectures demands more.
During my Hanover years--have you noticed this oddity: most of you get through your Hanover years in 4 but my number is up to 11 and counting, as a friend of mine says, "but I digress"--during my Hanover years, I have attended a number of mortar board last lectures--for a couple of years I served as faculty advisor to mortar board, observing the selection of speakers to stand at this podium--hearing students articulate a respect, an affection, if you will, for particular faculty, and then witnessing the wonder of that last lecture.
Tonight I stand before this audience of scholars--not an easy crowd--who, in this odd little community where we have taken up residence, are also my neighbors. I wonder whether many of the scholars seated here tonight realize the significance of this podium. Over the years I have listened as last lecturers described the connections between themselves and their vocation, talked about the shaping of their identity, and evaluated a life. These last lectures have featured wisdom, humor, and insight as speakers revealed a part of themselves which rarely surfaces in the frenetic pace of the academic term. I have walked from this room again and again struck by the amazing, poignant presentation I just witnessed. This podium, this forum, has a remarkable but unfortunately largely unrecorded, legacy. To step up here and speak my piece--to lay my contribution onto the table to rest next to those of my predecessors is truly daunting. That said, here goes...
II. The rules of this game call for me to speak as though this is my last lecture and there is a particular aptness to these rules. In my case this may very well be true. I have chosen this forum, on this day, to announce that I am dying. Indeed, my entire theme tonight centers on DEATH.
Today, as everyone should know, is Veterans Day. In the old days folks called this Armistice Day because at 11 am on the 11th day of November (the 11th month) 1918, the war ended. For almost 1600 days the peoples of the western world assaulted one another with a murderous tenacity and efficiency which shook the smug confidence of most of a civilization. At 10:58 a state of war existed, but a couple of minutes later the guns of August fell silent. The participants called it, among other things, the Great War because they had never seen anything like it and hoped never to see another one--greatness in this case carrying a connotation of awesome or reverential dread. The sense of relief and celebration on this day was almost indescribable--the slaughter had come to an end. Another name for this conflict was the War to End All Wars. As the twentieth century winds down we are quite a bit more cynical and clearly less optimistic over the prospects of ending warfare--after all no one calls the 1914-18 war the War to End All Wars anymore--except in a mocking voice because it was followed by the Spanish Civil War, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, the Japanese invasion of China, and the Soviet war on Finland--all before the start of the next big war. Since 1945 there have been more wars and other conflicts than one cares to name or number, let alone remember. Some years ago I ran across a statistic asserting something in excess of 120,000,000 war-related deaths since World War II.
The Great War, while incredible at its time, no longer serves as a standard for measuring conflicts --in a sense its greatness has been outdone by subsequent more lethal wars and we have become somewhat inured to the spectacle of death. (World War I has sufficiently receeded into popular memory to warrant a PBS 8 hour documentary). After the next great war--World War II--this day of remembrance mutated into a day to commemorate the sacrifice of all veterans of war. Even so for many the day seems to mean little more than a day off work, closed banks, and no mail which is unfortunate because there is value in pausing to consider its implications--to note for example the sort of innocence which is shocked that civilized people are capable of conducting such slaughter and yet retain sufficient innocence still to hope that such devastation and slaughter will not be repeated--and to consider the implications of death.
Indulge me in a tangent...For much of the past three summers I have returned to my boyhood home to take up residence with my grandfather while pursuing a research project on college students in the 1920s and 1930s. These summers have been rich in part because of the joy of scholarship in the archives of the University of Notre Dame and the archives of the Mennonite Church at Goshen College but also because my grandfather has told stories. One of my favorites from this summer relates to this day. On November 7, 1918 my grandfather ran through the rain to the center of the small Michigan town where he lived because the townspeople began to celebrate the end of the war. A rumor circulated that the war in Europe was over. In the process my grandfather got soaked and then fell so ill that he was home in bed when the actual armistice was announced, thus missing the real celebration. The point of celebrating is clear--the end of the battle and the killing, but then the more difficult task of giving meaning to this sequence of events began.
After the initial boisterous celebrations, commemorations of the war became more solemn--in Great Britain everyone and everything came to a standstill for two minutes on each November 11. Towns across Europe and the United States erected monuments which served as gathering places each November 11--for rituals of remembrance. On many of these monuments the names of the dead were carved--in a small English parish of about 70 families the monument lists 24 names for the 1914-18 war--quite an impact on a small community. As years passed and personal memory receded, the war of 1914-18 became less immediate, replaced by other cataclysms which cried out for remembrance and interpretation. We may not appear terribly interested in the past in the ways that our grandparents and their grandparents were, witness the small turnout for the traditional rituals on Veteran's Day or Memorial Day--but in other ways we do similar things for those events which touch us--for many the AIDS quilt fills a similar space. People are struggling to find appropriate ways to commemorate other disasters of this century: Germans are currently debating the form for a holocaust memorial in Berlin (one proposal calls for something similar to the World War I memorials and Washington's Vietnam memorial but the task would require decades to carve the millions of names) and the Russians are debating a monument to Stalin's victims. The Vietnam Memorial in DC is a powerful remainder for many. History, whether academic or personal, attends to the major events of an era and the subsequent discussion and interpretations of its meanings, but as time passes the consideration becomes less and less personal and more detached and sometimes scholarly.
Death has been very much part of the focus of my scholarly attention for two decades--the Holocaust, Stalin's purges, the two world wars, and other events on a long, long grisly list. Immersing oneself in such a field requires some sort of peculiar mind set or some serious mental and emotional gymnastics in order to sustain some equilibrium--Curtis asks why would someone want to devote so much intellectual energy to such unrelentingly hideous topics? It is true that there are times when I feel like a small part of me is wounded by this or that part of my study. However I also believe that the study of these subjects produces useful insights into the human situation and elicits various examples which, outside of the classroom, I will assert are important principles for consideration by other people in other ages and locations. Somewhere in my study of the Holocaust I came across the pithy statement that a million deaths is a statistic while one death is a tragedy. The statistics are merely a form of record keeping or accounting but it is the tragedies which potentially inform us.
A new film, "The Grass Harp", based on a story written by Truman Capote, has wind blowing through a field as though playing a harp with messages from the dead to the living. I am not so much in touch with the mystical but I do believe there are lessons provided by memory and by examples from lives past, messages which instruct us in the ever-present questions of how then should we live, if we take the time and effort to listen. I am struck by the stories of folks during the second Great War--World War II--like Frantz Jaeggerstatter, the Austrian farmer who refused conscription in the German army because he was convinced that the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union was unjust/immoral, or Hans and Sophie Scholl who denounced the evil of the Hitler regime--in contrast to those who sought to justify their evil deeds after the fact with the defense that if they had not slaughtered Jews and other enemies of the Nazi regime they too would have been killed. While some people will do anything to prolong their own lives, others like the Jaeggerstatters and the Scholls chose death rather than lead an immoral existence
My ruminations on death have recently become much more personal--I am concerned about 2 impending deaths: my grandfather's and mine. My grandfather is 92 years old and his health is deteriorating. Over the recent summers I have watched the decline of this one life which is very sobering. In the process his vigor has weakened so that he has given up golf and dropped out of the band, he dwells more and more on the past and engages the present in gradually diminishing ways. As his world shrinks he knows the final outcome--he is going to die. This summer I was sure that he would die before the end of the year but surgery in August seems to have pushed the immediacy back some distance.
In the process of watching my grandfather step closer and closer to his death I have thought about death in ways different from and yet similar to death as an academic topic. His life has been long and full--he has regaled me with stories of the armistice, or how he missed by 15 minutes the opportunity to play in John Phillip Sousa's band or his circus story. Since his family did not have much money, he and his brothers, like many other kids there, would earn tickets when the circus came to town by carrying water for the elephants. My grandfather, age 7 or so, joined the labor-intensive bucket brigade and then returned home tickets in hand. This tired little boy fell asleep and missed not only dinner but the circus too. Of course his brothers mercilessly teased him which added to his misery. There are many more stories I could tell you but they would not be the treasures they are to me because you do not know this man. He has given me these gifts of memory which will stay with me long after death has separated me from his immediate company. My academic studies, at times, provide similarly personal stories although many of my subjects died before my birth.
Why do I talk to you about death at a time when you look forward to IS's, graduation, careers, love and the like? Is it because I am hopelessly grim, worn down by the topics I study? I think not. In many ways your thoughts on the future probably are not so terribly different from those of countless folks in the spring of 1914 or the summer of 1939, people who could not anticipate the tragedy ahead. In the records they left, they were living in anticipation of a basically conventional life made up of many of the same elements which each of us hope to have--love, promotion, children, flowers and ice cream--i am not quite sure whether to characterize this as a complete or an incomplete list. But death is a curious thing--shadowy but ever-present. A couple of years ago, within a span of 10 days or so, I attended two funerals for Hanover students whose promising lives abruptly ended. Although death is unavoidable, striking everyone, my studies and my experience suggests the process is a bit like a card game where the dealer gives us one card at a time. Who knows what the next card will bring--will the game continue or is this the last card? In all ages some people live long, rich lives--apparently dodging the bullets which fill the air while others die young--wars and other cataclysms are not necessary to foster grief.
As I said early on, I am facing death--in the history I have chosen to study and teach, of my grandfather and of myself. What am I to make of this? Well obviously, for my grandfather and for myself the personal immediacy means that I cannot approach this in the same way that I approach the Great War or the Holocaust--as an academic subject which implies some level of detachment and objectivity. I am encountering a series of existential questions which humans from every age and every culture have faced at some point in their lives. The question of death leads to musings on the very meaning of life. One bit of insight gleaned from my academic studies and personal reflection is that the way one thinks about death--whether as a statistic or a tragedy, that is in the accumulated numbers of remote and not so remote events of this century or our own time and in the events of our own lives--what one thinks death is about has tremendous affect on how one lives one's life. Death's ever-presence and its certainty indicate to me that one of the important questions is not what is death but how then should one live.
well, the question is out on the table, HOW THEN SHOULD ONE LIVE? Rest easy because I am not going to attempt to detail or even outline the meaning of life in the brief time remaining to me this evening. What I have to offer are four simple but paradoxical principles--a modest list when compared to the ten commandments Moses brought down from Mount Sinai, the 95 theses Martin Luther nailed to the church door, or the 14 points Woodrow Wilson took to Versailles. In response to the question of how then should one live, here is my partial answer:
1) Be serious but whimsical. Engage one's studies or vocation with an honesty, integrity and dedication but also be ready to amuse oneself or others with an observation on the absurdity of things or the pomposity of oneself or others.
2) Be discriminating but curious. Recognize the difference between quality and junk but avoid the rut of the familiar and comfortable which precludes the examination of new and different things and risks staleness--sample broadly but indulge selectively.
3) Be principled but cultivate harmony. Argue ideas and issues, represent fairly yourself and others, and offer reconciliation whenever possible--there are few winners in civil war (I am Irish, so I should know).
4) Seek beauty but confront ugliness. Time is too short to overlook the gee-whiz wonder of nature and the joy of a child's unrestrained laughter but injustices and abuses must be named and denounced.
I also want to rail against the contemporary but vacuous bumper sticker-t-shirt wisdom of the "he who dies with the most toys wins" variety. This pernicious faux wisdom glosses over the fact that the toys do not go with the dead which means that the survivors, deserving and undeserving, get them and passes over the reality that all of one's goods and possessions can rot, be stolen or be lost. Invest in situations and people, which produce the memories which become your legacy.
A wise man once said that if I knew that the world would end tomorrow I would still plant a tree today. How then should one live? I say with a passion, an urgency, a curiosity, a verve, an intensity, a determination to experience, taste, consider, and feel as much as possible in the who knows how much time we have. Alan Seeger, a poet who died in 1916, wrote these words:
It may be that he shall take my hand
And lead me into his dark land
And close my eyes and quench my breath;
It may be I shall pass him still.
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow flowers appear.
God knows 'twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear...
But I've a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.
On this day of remembrance, I choose to face death, that is to live here and now, with you, my friends and neighbors. In this way I walk to the future while looking backwards (hopefully I will not crash into a tree along the way).
Thank you.
[Delivered 11 November 96 in Classic 102 to an audience of approximately 30 students and faculty. Thornton arrived late for the event because he did not know where it had been scheduled.]
Please send comments to:
thornton@hanover.edu