Williams College - Gulielmensian Yearbook (Williamstown, MA)

Page 23 text:

the dimness of our souls away. IVhy do things get so dim and unclear? Going along in the old routine, we get in a kind of acquiescent numbness, we get used to things, we don't see sharply or hear clearly or feel in- tensely. I had a teacher of creative writing once who told our class, You must look at things not only as if you were seeing them for the first time but as if you were seeing them for the last time, as if you were never to see them again and had to take them all in and remem- ber them foreverf, Keep that in mind the next time you look around at these hills. Never, never get used to them! We need to be jolted out of our numbness, often not so gently as my teacher did it. Such men as I,', cried Dmitri Karamazov, need a blow . .. . and he spoke for the whole human race. Sometimes nothing but death will remind us that we are alive. That's a terrible thing to say, but itls true. Love and death . . . What has tortured me these past ten months since Mathilde died are the things I didn't say, the love I didn't express. Why was I so dim, so finicky, so inhibited, so embarrassed? Or were the look in the eyes enough, the squeeze of the hand, the kiss on the brow? I hope to God they were. Heaven knows she was up to anything. She had nerve for both of us. She and Aunt Speedie would have gotten along fine. A week before she died, I came in her room wear- ing a new dark-green shirt under an old greenish tweed jacket. They were made for each other, she said. You could wear them anywhere - even my funeralf, Which I did. The evening of the night she died, she was hilarious, never wittier, and Cas alwaysj a bit of a rascal. She ribbed her doctor about what a lousy skier he was. When a friend asked her why she couldn't eat a bit of the love- ly cheese cake she'd brought her, she replied, Because, my dear, I have a touch of cancerf, It was at the time those three doctors went to examine Nixon in San Clemente to see if he was well enough to testify. In my then-state of compassion, I averred as how it was tough on the poor man to have to go through all that examination again. Our cheese-cake friend, a veteran Nixon-hater, said, Nonsense! Nothing is bad enough for that man,', etc., etc. f'No,', said Mathilde, looking quite saintly on her sickbed, you're wrong. I'm so full of love I can't wish harm on any one. And with a twinkle she added, f'You know, if I should get well, I think I'd be rather nice. f Death is the mother of beauty. D Then another friend said, '6Tillie, when you get well, I want you to make me one of those saintsf, fTil was a potter, I should tell you, and did ceramic sculpture. One of her favorite themes was St. Francis and the birdsj Evaline, she answered, if I get well, I'll make nothing but saints. Six hours later she was dead. Aunt Speedie was one up on her: Mathilde didn't close her own eyes. NVill it shock you A it shouldnit by now - when I tell you that I closed them? It was very simple, very sad and very beautiful. Love and death . . . It's clear to me that the closer she came to death, the more she learned to love and the more she learned about love - and the more she taught us both to love and about love. The departing light clarified the sight -in all of us. She knew where she was going, and she knew what she was learning, and she talked about it. 4'These last three months, she told her doctor a few weeks before the end, have been the best of my life. I wouldn't have missed them for anythingf, To understand more fully this remarkable statement, you must hear the last letter she ever wrote. It was to a friend, Holly Tuttle of New Haven, who lost her hus- band some years ago. The letter says more about love and death than I could in a week of convocation ad- dresses. It's more than just a letter, it's a document. And I read it to you with no embarrassment at all. Re- member: There's something in the Hightf That clari- fies the sight. All things -individual lives, colleges, libraries, college educations -M take on new meaning in the light of their endings - or when they end for you, as they must. Love them while you can, and never, never be embarrassed. And now here's the letter, and I'm done: Dear' Holly: E You sent me such a good letter - I do want to answer. The problem of dealing with this fellow Death has been interesting. fFunny, what would womanls lib say to my making Death masculine? Surely I can't think of myself being swept up by a lady.J In the first place, when I saw him come striding up to my house - garbed in all his strange garments that we humans have wished on him - I wasnlt in the least spooked. I opened the door and we had a nice little chat. Subsequent chats have been reas- suring, and I know hels my good friend. I'm sure you have a nodding acquaintance with him so you have the same feelings. Then there's LOVE. I feel I'd never have known its endless horizons had I lived out my full span. Somehow in a smooth life we take each other for granted, and now, even with someone like Richard, new little vistas open up - and with casual acquaintances, whole worlds. My plumber, Tommy Citerella, stopped in to see me after he'd attended to our various drips and leaks. He sat down and looked out at the view I have from my bed: a valley, a mill house, a waterfall, a lake - all hung in the most gorgeous color. Missus, he said, you have to have faith. You have to pray. God's never failed me. Hels saved me three times. Tommy,l' I said, 'AI don't know where to aim my prayers. God is such a mystery. 'fMissus, he said, t'don't worry. I'll take over all the praying. And he took my two hands and leaned down and kissed me on the brow. So now - what do I have to worry about. Love, Til 'P Death is the mother of beauty . . . a sense of the ending. Do you see what I mean?

Page 22 text:

deeply ff in this case, his belief in the innocence of a slandered young lady. One can feel his frustration in every word: Call me a foolg Trust not my reading nor my observations, Which with experimental seal doth warrant The tenour of my book: trust not my age, lNIy reverence, calling, nor divinity, If this sweet lady lie not guiltless here lfnder some biting error. Fifty years tbetween l7 and 67j make a lot of differ- ence, and now at last I know what the Friar felt: the frustration of trying to convey something you feel deeply to an audience that is either skeptical or uninvolved. The Friar put my dilliculty plainly, even if it is not quite the same as his. I want to talk to you today about matters which cannot be to you as intensely personal as they are to meg I'm involved as you cannot be, and I cannot bridge the gap by the triumphant march of logic, by statistics, by hard evidence. I want to share with you, simply, a bit of experience I've picked up on the way. Oh, there are lots of ubiting errorsw I could expose, were my mood so inclined: educational fallacies ram- pant in my own beloved New Haven and right here in IVilliamstowng the sinister drift of our national culture and politics and economyg the global threats to our en- vironment and our peace. I could scare you to death! Ur, changing the tune, as appropriate to this day, I could talk about the library as the beating heart of this or any other educational institution. I could talk about Jack Sawyer and all he did for this college. But although all these possibilities are close to my mind and heart, they are not closest, and I decided I must talk about what is closest or I'd better not talk at all. XYhat is closest? just two things, intimately bound, almost in- separable: love and death. Shortly after I came to this decision, I ran across a remark by VVilliam Butler Yeats. MI am still of the opinion, he wrote, Hthat only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mind - sex and death? My first thought was: VVhat a stuffy way to put it! And my second was: IYhy be so glandular? Why sex and death? I prefer my way of putting it, and Woody Allen's: love and death. I don't intend to be clinical about either, and I am not addressing the serious and studious mind. I am talking' to you as fel- low pilgrims -- old, iniddle-aged and young- in this vale of tears and laughter. And I want to share with you a little of what I've learned this past year-I would say the most educational year of my life, the high-water mark of my experience as a human being, I guess you'll have to know the facts: My wife, Ma- thilde, died of cancer of the pancreas last November, and my brother john fYYilliams 'QED was killed in a car accident last Nfarch. YVith all the tragedy in the world, you may wonder at my bringing up these two personal losses. It may seem a little impudent of me, even a little embarrassing. 'fThey talk of hallowed things,', said Emily Dickinson, trying to explain her aversion to so- ciety, hand embarrass my dog. But she was young when she said that. She clainmed up, and she was wrong. She was too easily embarrassed. So here's the first and perhaps simplest thing Iave learned this past year: Never be embarrassed to talk about hallowed things, like love and death. XVe Amer- icans are a little finicky about both. IVe reduce love to sex and talk about it clinically as in Kinsey and the sex books, or grossly as in Plqrboy and Penthouse, or senti- mentally as in the popular songs. Thcre,s very little talk about the tragic side of love, the comic side of love, love as a discipline, love as a means of education, love as the end and aim of education, the very reason weire here today. And as for death, we hide from it, pretty it up, pack it away in hospitals, spend millions every year on lavish funerals, or get so glutted with it over the media that we hear or read, with hardly a tremor, about hundreds of thousands dying in Vietnam, or Africa, or Bangla- desh. The result is that death is hardly real at all to us. It's a forbidden subject except at funerals and in sermons that aim to take away its sting. I think we'd be better able to cope with it if we talked about it more, if we shared our experience of it more frankly. And so I'm facing you with itx ironically, on this festive oc- casion, this day of a new beginning when the last thing you want to hear about is the old, old ending. Which leads me to the second thing I've learned this past year: Itis a sense of the ending that makes the be- ginning, and all that follows therefrom, so much more meaningful. Why deny a reality that, paradoxieally, can be so life-giving, so enriching? I heard the other day of a great-great-grandinother who- this was generations ago-amazed her family by announcing one morning: I want to die in that rocking chair, and I'm going to close my own eyes. She did both. Her name was Experience Bardwell Lyman. The young people called her 'fAunt Speedie, and a hundred years later her descendants are still talk- ing and laughing about her and living a little more fully because of her. I wonder if this is what Wallace Stevens had in mind when he wrote, Death is the mother of beautyf, Her great-grandchildren still point to that rocker. Aunt Speedie knew how to die and how to talk about it. She had a sense of her ending - clear-eyed, frank, unabashed, humorous. Nfy friend Emily Dickinson knew how to talk about it, too: By a departing light We see acuter, quite, Than by a wick that stays. Thert-'s something in the flight That clarifies the sight And decks the rays. 'fThere's something in the Hightf That clarifies the sight . . or, in the words of the old hymn, takes

Page 24 text:

5' F5