Some Notes on Carrying the Fire in Your Education
A Commencement Speech Delivered to the Graduating Class of Chapel Field Christian High School, 6-17-2023
Parents, Family, Faculty, and Especially to the Graduates of the class of 2023,
Standing up here I can’t help but think of that classic work of art, Back to the Future. There is a scene where Marty McFly is trying to convince Dr. Emmett Brown that he is from the future, and he tells him that in 1984 Ronald Reagan is president. Dr. Brown laughs at Marty and exclaims: Ronald Reagan? The actor?
I imagine that when some of you learned that I was going to be the commencement speaker you might have said to yourself: Brad McDuffie? The basketball coach?
In all seriousness, congratulations to all of you. I have written my remarks today to recognize the unique nature of the education you have received here at Chapel Field and what I feel like it represents for each of you going forward. I hope you will keep that in mind over the next few minutes.
Furthermore, today I would like to talk about my experience with education and the lessons I’ve learned over the years—both from being in institutions of higher learning and outside of them—with the hope that something I say might be useful to you as you go forth in pursuit of your own education in this world.
In college I majored in basketball and I minored in English. I went to Nyack College, and I vividly remember one afternoon when I was sitting in the office of my favorite English professor, Dr. Randy Smith. My college basketball career was over, and I honestly had no idea what I was going to do next with my life. I remember looking around his office—he had some posters of bands, a bookshelf, a desk overflowing with papers and books—and I remember thinking: I would like to do this! That was in 1999. Six years later, Nyack hired me and gave me the keys to that same office.
Now, the way that I just told that story you might think that my path back to that office was a straight line, but I assure you it was not.
In fact, if I were honest with you at the time, I would have told you I had no idea what I was doing teaching in a college classroom.
The first class I ever taught was right here at Chapel Field in the fall of 2000. I was one year out of college, and I taught 9th and 10th grade English. I had no idea what I was doing, but I was passionate about it and I eventually found my way in the classroom. One thing every teacher learns quickly is that you learn far more as a teacher than you ever did as a student.
Your students look upon you as an authority, someone who is supposed to be smart and wise, but I felt like an imposter—who am I to teach these students about anything? I’ve been teaching for 23 years, and on the first day of class I often feel the same way that I did in those early years. It is a humbling honor to be given the role to educate. With this in mind, I encourage you to be humble as you approach your own education—as a student and eventually as a teacher. Because, you will teach! Eventually we all end up teaching in some capacity.
While I was navigating my first year of teaching here at Chapel Field, there was a young man going to school here named Justin Chiarot. I did not have Justin in class and our paths never really crossed other than in a cursory sense—in the hallway or on the basketball court. But the way things go, Justin eventually found his way into one of my classes at Nyack. At the time I had not finished my PhD, and I was kind of the whipping boy of the English department—everyone liked to pat me on the head and remind me that though I was young and the students liked me—I was not yet “Dr. McDuffie.”
At the end of that semester, Justin wrote in his class evaluation—and I’m paraphrasing here—that he had attended Junior College for two years, had taken a few classes at Nyack, and that it was not until he took my class that he felt like he was in college.
Justin’s words were at the time, and still are today, the nicest and best compliment I have ever been given as a teacher. With my impostor syndrome still weighing heavily upon me during those years, it would be hard to put into words how Justin’s words lifted up my heart and buoyed me during that time (and if you know me, you know I play my cards pretty close to my chest). But if you have ever seen the ending of the movie Dead Poets Society, when the students call to Mr. Keating from on top of their desks, O Captain, My Captain!, look at Mr. Keating’s face as he says to his students, Thank you, Boys! So, I would like to take this moment to say, Thank you, Justin!
Beyond my personal feelings about them, Justin’s words are a lesson in education.
As St. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 1:27,
God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.
I want you to consider that verse with regards to education. I want you to consider it with regards to the esteemed institutions of higher education: Harvard, Yale, and Princeton:
God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.
Now, remember that these institutions were founded upon the same cornerstone of faith that you have received here at Chapel Field.
That was the preamble.
Class is now in session.
I. Remember your creator in the days of your youth
In his essay “Tradition and the individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot writes of an encounter that he had with someone who claimed that,
The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.
Eliot responds,
Precisely, and they are that which we know.
Eliot was mentored by a poet named Ezra Pound. Pound is famous for a telling the young Modernist artists—writers, sculptors, painters, musicians—to “make it new.” When people hear this phrase they often omit that Pound would tell the artists to first know the past and then to refine and distill that knowledge and Make it New.
As Eliot says, They—those dead writers of the past—provide the foundation of that which we know.
Graduates, as you reflect upon your own education and estimate its value, I want you to consider this passage from Pound’s book The Spirit of Romance. In this passage, Pound, provides a meditation upon the inner culture of the Middle Ages from the regola (or rule) of St. Benedict written in 530AD:
Concerning daily manual labor; Idleness is the enemy of the soul; hence brethren ought at certain seasons to occupy themselves with manual labor, and again at certain hours in holy reading. Between Easter and the Kalends of October let them apply themselves to reading from the fourth to the sixth hour. From the Kalends of October to the beginning of Lent let them apply themselves to the reading until the end of the third hour, and in those days of Lent let them receive a book apiece from the library and read it through.
[*Kalend is where we derive our word calendar from]
Regarding education, note the balance between the exterior, manual labor, and the life of the interior. This is the first lesson I want you to take with you. Pursue both. I would contend that there is a certain holiness that can be found in both physical and mental labor. This is the Genesis of Work:
And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.
And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,
And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good. Genesis 1:16-18
God looks upon his work and sees that it is good.
But, we also know that In the beginning was the Word . . . and the Word was God (John 1:1).
Note the Genesis of Work: the physical action of making with the interior life of the Word.
To return to Eliot’s words: Precisely, and they are that which we know. In your own education, your own inner culture, I want you to consider the consequences of not knowing, of not remembering those who have come before us.
Remember your creator in the days of your youth.
II. In your education remember that there is nothing new under the sun.
It is important to keep your education in its proper perspective. Knowledge and education are often accompanied by a certain vanity.
In his novel Old School, Tobias Wolff illustrates this problem of vanity well when he gives an account of the poet Robert Frost responding to a question from a faculty member, Mr. Ramsey, after he has given a poetry reading:
The question Mr. Ramsey asks speculates on the matter of providing a rhyme scheme, a form for poetry, and
Whether such a rigidly formal arrangement of language is adequate to express the modern consciousness. That is, should form give way to more spontaneous modes of expression, even at the cost of a certain disorder?
Modern Consciousness, Frost queries, what’s that?
Mr. Ramsey replies,
I would describe it as the mind’s response to industrialization, the saturation propaganda of governments and advertisers, two world wars, the concentration camps, the dimming of faith by science, and of course the constant threat of nuclear annihilation. Surely these things have had and effect on us. Surely they have changed our thinking.
Surely nothing, Frost retorts, Don’t tell me about science . . . I’m something of a scientist myself. Botany. You know what tropism is, it’s what make a plant grow toward the light. Everything aspires to the light. You don’t have to chase down a fly to get rid of it—you just darken the room, leave a crack of light in a window, and out he goes. Works every time. We all have that instinct, that aspiration. Science can’t, what was you word? Dim? Science can’t dim that. All science can do is turn out the false lights so the true light can get us home.
Frost continues,
I am thinking of Achilles’ grief, he said. That famous, terrible, grief. Let me tell you boys something. Such grief can only be told in form. Maybe it only really exits in form. Form is everything. Without it you’ve got nothing but a stubbed-toe cry—sincere, maybe, for what that’s worth, but with no depth or carry. No echo. You may have a grievance but you do not have grief and grievances are for petitions, not poetry.
******
Then out spake brave Horatius, captain of the gate,
To every man upon this earth death cometh soon or late
And how can man die better than facing fearful odds
For the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his gods.
To review: Remember your creator in the days of your youth (know the past and make it new), and there is nothing new under the sun.
And finally,
III. Carry the Fire
This past Tuesday (6-13-2023) Cormac McCarthy passed away. McCarthy is one of my literary heroes and one of the writers who has been a sentinel of my own education in literature. McCarthy represented an old order, an old code, and he carried that code like a beacon into a literary culture that has grown increasingly obsessed with its own reflection.
The title for McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men was taken from William Butler Yeats’ poem “Sailing to Byzantium”:
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms . . .
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
At one point in No Country for Old Men one of the characters poses a question:
If the rule you followed brought you to this point? Of what use was the rule?
I would like to re-frame that question in terms of education: If your education has brought you to this point, of what use was your education? This question is rhetorical. The answers will be different for everyone in the room. But the question is a beacon that can serve as a guide. What rule will you follow?
McCarthy was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his 2006 novel The Road. The Road is a post-apocalyptic novel that considers what rule men would follow if the laws of order and technological modalities of life were stripped away. With food sources depleted, the world of The Road is reduced to an existence of perpetual fear and horror. It is surely no country for old men, but it is also no place for women or children. Yet, as one critic observes,
The existence of a moral structure—the will to do good—is the soaring discovery hidden in McCarthy's scourged planet. . . . [He] gives us redemption in the form of the love between a parent and a child—their desire to be good although it serves no purpose.
Throughout The Road, a father leads his son through a wasteland, and as he leads him he tells him that they are carrying the fire. McCarthy writes that the child was the father’s warrant in this land and that if the boy is not the word of God God never spoke.
Late in the novel, as the father lays dying, the son considers the unthinkable—moving on into the wasteland of the world without his father. A dialogue ensues between them:
I want to be with you.
You cant.
Please.
You cant. You have to carry the fire.
I dont know how to.
Yes you do.
Is it real? The fire?
Yes it is.
Where is it? I dont know where it is.
Yes you do. It’s inside you. It was always there. I can see it.
Graduates, as you go forth into the world understand that your education is established upon the bedrock of the Word, and this Word has established the inner culture of your life.
With the Word as your fire, go forth into the world and into the rest of your education in this life.
Carry the fire.
It is inside of you. I can see it.
Class is dismissed.
