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Sitaram · Site Admin Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 1079

John Barth's Kenyon Commencement Address

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http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html

I just now found this interesting commencement address to the Graduating Class of 2005.

As I read through it, I shall take the liberty to post one or two excerpts below:

Quote:
Originally Posted by Miracles

There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan
wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the
two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that
comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not
like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I
haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last
month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I
was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was fifty below, and so I
tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a
God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'"
And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled.
"Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are,
alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that [happened] was: a
couple Eskimos come wandering by and showed me the way back to
camp."

Quote:
Originally Posted by Cruel Master
Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control
over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware
enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you
construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this
kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché
about "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master."

Quote:
Originally Posted by Worship
This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be
well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what
doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day
trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is
no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we
get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing
some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, bet
it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some
inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you
worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are
where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough,
never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty
and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age
start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.
On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths,
proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story.
The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

SFG75 · Posted: Fri Mar 24, 2006 11:24 am Post subject:

Reminds me a lot of the three modes of nature as listed in the
Bhagavad-Gita. Some live according to goodness and reap the benefits of
a good life. Mother Teresa, Bishop Oscar Romero, the Dalai Lama. All of
these great souls lived(and in the last case, continue to live) a wonderful
life and sought out life's meaning as best they could. I'd wager that the
vast majority of people live life looking for *passion* This passion can be
of many material things. Cars, good looks, the opposite gender, wealth.
There really is no end to it and I'd say of all the modes, it is definitely
one of the most pernicious that exists. The mode of ignorance is one that
I must admit that I'm not too knowledge of. I would imagine this is the
person who floats through life on auto-pilot, blissfully aware of anything
and everything around them. They punch the clock, go to work, watch
t.v., and then go to bed. Every day for their entire lives and their life is
the unexamined one that the Greeks fretted about.

Foolishness and madness are listed in the Bhagavad-Gita as fruits of those
who are ignorant. Trying to derive greater meaning out of society and
finding no proper recourse could literally drive one insane. More than on
philosopher and great mind have been ensconsed in asylums.

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