She delivered this speech Saturday.
It took me until my senior year to realize that my mom was right.
I finally started sleeping eight hours, exercising, and eating my vegetables. My mom had been right all along: Who knew these seemingly marginal tasks would improve your studies and general well-being?
The lesson I learned from my mom is corollary to that which I learned from the great books. The liberal arts are our elders, and we should trust them as such. They made it this far: we should probably listen to what they have to say. If Plato and Virgil and Herodotus have been around for this long, it is because their words are worthwhile. In this respect again our elders have something to teach us. We should act under the supposition that the corpus of the Western heritage is wiser than we are until we have at least tried its authors. The Iliad, in fact, shows us the pitfalls of pride, “King Lear,” the perils of abdicating responsibility, and Dante’s works, the deadliness of sin. Rather than making the same errors as the past, we can “stand on the shoulders of giants,” gaining from their wisdom and building on their work. Reading Homer, Cicero, and Augustine is like eating your vegetables: You may not think you like it at first, but you will feel so healthy afterwards.
Studying the liberal arts has both practical and impractical rewards. We believe that our studies here will make us better citizens, and that they will make us better persons. The well-ordered state requires well-ordered souls and well-ordered families. In Act One of William Shakespeare’s “King Lear,” Lear gives his power and lands to his daughters because he wants to “unburdened crawl toward death.” When he gives up his state, all hell breaks loose: We find division, rivalry, adultery, murder, insanity, and war, all because Lear abdicated his responsibility. We may not be the king of England, but we have a responsibility nonetheless: a responsibility to learn self-control, to practice humility, to exercise wisdom, and to be courageous. These are all virtues that Hillsdale teaches which its graduates can carry into the world. We have a great task before us: the recovery of Western civilization. As Dr. Bart taught me, Western civilization is always on the precipice of destruction. The ship is always sinking, and we always have to bail her out. The liberal arts serve this practical purpose: to produce good citizens who think about the common good above their personal interest. Our education in truth, beauty, and goodness is far from useless; rather, it profits the world a great deal since we are sent out to share what we have learned. Plato depicted the well-ordered soul as a well-ordered state. We affirm that a well-ordered state is made up of well-ordered souls.
The liberal arts are in another sense useless and gratuitous. They teach the student to wonder in silence. There are moments of study that consist of pure delight with no mercenary advantage. Lear also speaks of this in Act Five when he says to Cordelia, “so we’ll live / And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh / At gilded butterflies… / And take upon us the mystery of things, As if we were God’s spies.” That is what I have learned at Hillsdale: to take upon myself the mystery of things. We have been given, in the words of Edmund Burke, the “unbought grace of life,” a special privilege which we did not merit. Dr. Whalen will make you self-conscious and nervous for still being in school at the age of 22. He always asks his students, “Are you really okay? What sort of creature has to spend a quarter of its lifetime learning how to be itself?” The answer, of course, is a human. We take an immense amount of cultivation and training to realize what it means to be human. I have learned so much from my literature courses about what pertains to human flourishing. Hamlet teaches us about hasty errors in judgment, Dante about the speechless wonder of heaven, and Augustine about the restlessness of the human heart until it rests in God. The capacity to marvel at truth and beauty is by far the greatest gift I have gleaned from my time here.
I am so grateful for a student body of such ambition and vitality, a music department of such richness and beauty, a faculty of such kindness and brilliance, and an administration of such tireless dedication. My heart is full of gratitude to this community and indebtedness to its blessings. In the end, my advice to you is simple: Exercise, sleep, eat your vegetables, and trust your elders, be they Cicero or your mother.
Thank you.
