Duke University - Chanticleer Yearbook (Durham, NC)

Page 13 text:

grammar school teachers urged us to choose our mottoes then, in time, as though a motto were as vital as one’s health, one’s name. (What did one do with one's motto, once found?—write it on one’s walls? tattoo it on one’s chest? One lived by it, was the answer of course.) I looked for years, without satisfaction. Surrounded in the threatened air of that wartime America by a cloud of service, corps, battalion mottoes dedicated to de- struction—Semper Fidelis, Semper Para- tus, Keep Em’ Flying—I was relieved to discover that the motto of my family had been for a long time Vive Ut Vivas— Live That You May Live—but while I saw even then how vigorous it was, it seemed nothing personal; an old Welsh family’s slogan, not mine. So I lacked a motto. 9

Page 15 text:

But when I reached college—Duke, September 1951—I almost at once en- countered a sentence that steered a large pan of my time for those years. Harold Parker said it to his freshman history class of which I was a member in my second semester (he was quoting Waldo Beach of the Divinity School)— Edu- cation is an ever-widening vision of greatness. It seemed long for a motto (though my dictionary conceded that a motto might be a maxim adopted as a principle of behavior ), its verb should have been conditional and it ended vague- ly—what was the greatness” of which I was to be seeking an ever-widening vision in these four years, had presum- ably been seeking for twelve years al- ready? Greatness was, even in the fif- ties, a word tarnished nearly beyond cleaning. What was the meaning of any quality which common speech agreed to accord to, say, Napoleon, Hitler, Roose- velt and Gandhi? Beach and Parker were right however. Thanks to them and to a handful of other remarkable teachers, I came in that four years to know fewer and fewer things worthy of an educated man's pursuit and devotion. That is to say, education had been for me—and I hoped would continue to be, hoped my life would be—an understand- ing of that in the world and beyond the world (people, things, abstractions) which was worth one’s life, worth the full exercise of the mind and strength of a single human being, complex as that mind and strength are, appallingly fragile. (Another sentence which I discovered in my sophomore year was important for me also, both a confirmation, expansion and deepening of the other. It is Milton's famous definition of education from his essay Of Education: The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by re- gaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love Him, to imitate Him, to be like Him . . . ) 11