Duke University - Chanticleer Yearbook (Durham, NC)

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It was in England, at Oxford—after my graduation from Duke in 1955—that I encountered still another sentence which seemed to have both steering and braking power. It was told to me by my teacher, Lord David Cecil; and it had been said by his grandfather Robert Cecil, Lord Salisbury, Victoria's Prime Minister. As I recall the story, Lord David’s mother had said to the old man, Father, don't you think it matters very much for the children to do thus and so. . . .?” And Lord Salisbury had replied, My dear, nothing matters very much and few things matter at all.” The remark seemed to me then—as it does now—both moving and shocking, consolatory and subversive. It is not at all a new observation. It appears at first sight to share the weariness of Marcus Aurelius, the easy disillusionment of Ec- clesiastes, the Rubaiyat and a million sophomores' diaries—Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. But that is not what Lord Salisbury said (though well he might, having presided for years over the largest empire in the history of the world) — not All is vanity” nor Nothing matters but Nothing matters very much and few things matter at all.”—What few things? My own formal education lasted nine- teen years (my whole education will be, I hope, conterminous with my life), and the list I have made of the few-things- 12

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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

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that-matter would be irrelevant and in- tolerably presumptuous here now. In any case, the list has altered, is altering year- ly; and the fullest record of the effort to make it and keep it (such as it has been) is contained or implied in my stories and novels. Summary, as usual, would only be a lie. 13