Baccalaureate Remarks of President William G. Durden '71

Baccalaureate signifies the official beginning of the activities surrounding graduation from Dickinson College. At the close of tomorrow morning’s activities, you—the Class of 2003—will “commence” forth from these limestone walls as alumni of Dickinson College and look forward to a life of fulfillment and opportunity, leadership and service, challenge and resolve. Baccalaureate, however, when executed well, also represents a ceremonial space to reflect on your four years at Dickinson.

This afternoon, these reflections are perhaps thought by you to be within your solid, still youthful grasp—you hold them to you securely and clearly. You remember precisely key moments in your personal relationships, intellectual epiphanies, your academic and athletic, and social successes—even failures.

However, is that really so? Are you so firmly in grip of what really happened from 1999 to now. Even as you sit here, that tricky thing called memory is already working within you and upon you. That complete hold you thought you had on the facts of your Dickinson experience is slowly changing and being reworked into an emerging narrative. Reflection is aggressively transforming recollection. This is not a bad thing; it is as natural as aging gracefully. You are entering a labyrinth of your own construction.

Over the past year, I have visited a good number of classes. On one such visit, I happened upon a very healthy debate about the usefulness and verity of memoirs and memories relating to the recollections of adults about their years as TRANSPORTKINDER—transport children—during WWII. One student was particularly skeptical about the accuracy of memoirs, noting that memories are unreliable and that narrative written long after the fact will be colored by the ever-stretching, increasingly distorting veil of intervening developments and events.

This student was, of course making a very valid point. I was proud of her actually for her thoughtfulness. The insight is a shared one by all those who challenge the mind’s capacity to recreate that which is true—that which in fact happened. In the preface to her highly acclaimed, recent memoir about living as a woman and professor of literature in Iran, (READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN), Azar Nafisi wrote “the facts in this story are true insofar as any memory is ever truthful.” It is so with everyone.

As you progress through life and reflect on your four years at Dickinson, you, too, will find that there is a changing dialect between truth and memory. Memories that are vivid now will fade; others will become more relevant; others will disappear altogether. You might even become so exasperated with the tricks your mind plays on you that you will conclude as did Austerlitz in the W.G. Sebald novel of the same name, “It does not seem to me…that we understand the laws governing the return of the past, but I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all.” You might even go so far in the absolute frustration of your mind’s unwillingness to serve you accurately, as did Austerlitz when he asked of a cast-iron column he lingered before as a child and reencountered as a middle-aged man, if it might re-present him truthfully all those decades ago and speak to him of how he really was as a child—who he was, how he conducted himself. Indeed, in your wildest moments, you might decades from now revisit this exact spot and ask of Old West (the imposing, unfading observer of all) an honest portrayal of the years you inhabited Dickinson as a student.

You will soon learn that nothing is more elusive than a fact once firmly held. Facts, if they are ever to be recaptured, will only be achieved in the company of those who sit with you now—those who shared your Dickinson years between 1999 and 2003 and are willing, vested characters in reengaging and reconstructing that which was the only basis you have—shared time and space. I anticipate that you will reconnect with each other many times in the years to come—at alumni events and informal gatherings. You will spend hours together reconstructing and rearranging your recollections—creating narratives of possible action retrieved, trying to grasp again what really was! You will sometimes debate into the wee hours of the night not what occurred, but even if it occurred. You might even very late at night and in great desperation summon forth the wisdom of that great philosopher, Cher—"If I could turn back time, if I could find the way.” Such is the fickleness and unyielding character of memory. But such is also the power of distant facts to create for you their own useful, consoling narrative, their own poetry that can be recited again and again with constant variation, an often incomplete recovery that delights despite missing its goal.

I congratulate you on successfully completing your temporal journey through the global space that is Dickinson. And, come to think of it —what in truth did I really say this afternoon? Can anyone really remember or is it that all those words—now delightfully lost to recollection and given to poetry—are merely absorbed by Old West. How consoling.

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