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The Thoreau Institute
at Walden Woods Library
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Walter Harding
(1917-1996)
Live Your Own Life
President
Jakubauskas, members of the College Council, colleagues on the
faculty, parents and friends, and above all members of the
graduating class of 1984.
First, my hearty congratulations to you parents. I know
exactly how proud you feel today because I too have a son graduating
from this platform this morning.
Next, my equally hearty congratulations to you of the
Class of 1984. I know exactly how proud you feel for I too am
receiving a degree today. I hope you will accept me into your class
even though I have been somewhat retarded. It has taken you four
years
— or some of you three years — to attain your degree, while it has
taken me twenty-eight. I'm just a slow learner, I guess.
Standing up here on this platform on this occasion somehow reminds
me of an incident at the Harvard Commencement not may years back.
One days Mrs. J. Higginson Saltonstall, who is one of the bluest of
Boston bluebloods and one of the wealthiest, called the President of
Harvard on the phone and said she wanted to talk with him about her
horse, Gwendolyn. Gwendolyn she said was a wonderful horse, is a
beautiful horse, is a speedy horse; it was a gentle horse and very
intelligent horse. In fact, so intelligent that she wanted Harvard
to give it an Honorary Degree. The President sputtered, stammered
and started and finally said, "I don't see how we can do that." She
said, "Well, if you will, I'll give Harvard $10 million to build a
building to be named after you." Commencement came and there was
Gwendolyn on the platform with all the rest of the guests in
cap and gown. When they came to Gwendolyn's citation it read: "This
is the first horse to receive an honorary degree from Harvard."
Well, now down to more serious things. When I was chosen
to give this commencement speech
today, I trust the committee realized that it was inevitable that I
would have something to say about Henry Thoreau for I have been a
monomaniac about Henry Thoreau for nearly fifty years. I shall not
disappoint them on that score. Thoreau, I have found, has something
pertinent (or, as he would say, "impertinent") to say on many
appropriate subjects.
Thoreau, by the way, for any of you who are not familiar
with his name, lived in Concord, Massachusetts, from 1817 to 1862,
was a close friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson, went to Walden Pond just
outside of Concord to life in a cabin of his own making and then
wrote his masterpiece, Walden, about that experiment; he also
went to jail to protest against slavery, and then wrote his essay
"Civil Disobedience" about the experience, an essay that through its
adoption by such people as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King has
helped change the history of the world for the better. Thoreau is a
man who has given meaning to many of our lives.
Although he himself was an honor graduate of Harvard,
Class of 1837, I must confess that he did not have a particularly
high opinion of colleges in general or in particular. When his
friend Emerson once boasted that Harvard taught all the branches of
learning, Thoreau quickly replied, "Yes, but none of the roots."
When Harvard, as was their strange practice then, offered him a
master's degree, five years after graduation, for the mere payment
of a five dollar diploma fee, he refused it, saying, "Let every
sheep keep its own skin." He thought colleges had too many
professors of philosophy and too few real philosophers. And he said
he got more from his association with cultivated companions on the
college campus than he did from his classes. (An idea with which,
incidentally, I strongly agree.)
But enough of Thoreau's thoughts about colleges. Let me
get down to the business of the day. One of Thoreau's strongest
beliefs was that we each should live our own lives,
live them as fully as possible. As he said about his move out to
Walden Pond in 1845, "I went to the woods because I wished to live
deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if
I could not learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die,
discover that I had not lived."
He knew he had but one life to live and he wanted to
make the most of it. He wanted to be certain that when he reached
the end of that life that he had not wasted it, for, as he said,
"Life is so dear."
He went ahead and lived the life he thought best for
him, despite the remonstrances of his friends and neighbors who
wished he would live a more conventional life. And believed it so
successfully that only a few weeks before his death he was able to
say that he regretted nothing.
Thoreau was also completely convinced that each one of
us could live completely satisfying lives if we only had the courage
to do it. "The mass of men ," he said, "lead lives of quiet
desperation." But there is no need for them to if they would only
direct their own lives rather than doing what they thought others
expect of them. "Live your own lives," he says, in essence, over
and over again.
Now don't get the idea I am suggesting that you each go
out into the woods and build a cabin there. That's not the idea at
all. Thoreau says very specifically in Walden, "I would not
have any one adopt my mode of living on any account (for) I desire
that there may be as many different persons in the world as
possible; (and) I would have each one be very careful to find out
and pursue his own way and not his father's or his mother's
or his neighbor's instead." Thoreau was saying that if we wish to
live satisfying lives, we must live our own lives, not someone
else's life.
Today's ceremony is called "Commencement." You may
wonder why "Commencement" comes at the end of your college career
rather that at the beginning. But while it may be at the end of
your college days, it is the beginning of your adult life. This is
the first day of the rest of your life, and it is a day filled with
vitally important decisions. You are setting a pattern today for
your whole life. Let me say once more, "Live your own life. Be
true to yourself."
As you set out on your career today, remember that it is
your life and no one else's. Only you can live your own life. No
one else can do it for you. And no one else should try to do it for
you. I'm not saying you should not listen to advice from others. Of
course you should listen. But remember the final decision should be
yours. The buck stops with you.
If you are about to embark on a career today —
and I don't care what that career is
—
only (and I stress that word only
—
if you embark on that career only because it is the thing to do
—
the fashionable way to go
—
if that's the only reason, then don't do it. You may
be told fantastic tales of big bucks ahead, or of great prestige and
great power. But the only fantastic thing about most of the
fashionable careers is really how often, and how quickly, these
professions of the day turn out to be but fads and get filled up to
overflowing and leave those who embarked on those fashionable
careers stranded where they neither wanted nor want to be. On the
other hand, if what happens to be the fashionable career of the
moment is what deep down inside you you really want to do, not
because it is fashionable, but because you know it is "your thing",
don't let me or anyone else discourage you. Go do your thing.
There's always room at the top for the good man.
If you are about to embark on your career only
(and again I stress only) only because it is your father's or
your grandfather's or your uncle's business, whether it's selling
cars or selling houses or whatever, when really deep down underneath
you would rather be doing something else, don't join the family
business even if it promised the greatest of sinecures and all sorts
of wealth and security. What your father, grandfather or uncle
enjoys may simply not be your thing and could lead you into one of
those "lives of quiet desperation" and of boredom. On the other hand
, once again, if the family business really suits you to a "T", go
to it and consider yourself remarkably lucky.
If you are about to embark on a career only
—
again
—
only because it has been a tradition in your family for generations
that the eldest son be a farmer or a physician or whatever, when
your heart lies elsewhere, forget the tradition. Your progenitors
had their lives to live; you have your own. It is your life you are
living. not theirs. Live it to the hilt in your own
way.
If you are about to embark on a career only
because your mother always wanted to have a clergyman in the family
or because your father has always wanted to be a lawyer and felt he
didn't have a chance, don't do it. As harsh as it may sound, remind
them that they have had their lives to live and you have yours.
Live your own life to the fullest.
Now, let us consider another matter. What if you embark
on a career, even the career which you yourself ardently wanted, and
then discover to your amazement and disappointment that it is not
the career you thought it to be, what then? And let me assure you
that it is perfectly possible for that to happen. What then? Or
what if after a number of perfectly satisfying years in one career,
you find another more enticing? What then?
My advice
—
and Henry David Thoreau's advice
—
is to have the courage to quit and change your career. If you do
not find yourself greeting each new day with joy; if you find
yourself watching the clock and waiting for the final bell to ring;
if you find yourself thinking of Monday as "blue Monday" and saying
of Friday "TGIF"
—Thank
God, it's Friday; if you find yourself yearning all year for
vacation and when vacation is over, hating to go back to work, then
it is time for a change, and make that change. Thoreau, you
will recall, spent only a little over two years at Walden Pond and
then he realized that he "had several more lives to live," and so
left the pond for other ways. It's never too late to start over.
And it is far better to start over than to waste your life in a rut
that you do not want to be in. Remember, again, you have but one
life to live. Get out and live it.
The pattern of life I am urging you to follow is not one
that all will encourage you in. I am sure there are some of your
loved ones up in the balcony here today who are horrified by what I
have been saying. They will urge you not to listen to me. Really
what I have been saying is not to listen even to me, but to listen
rather to yourself. Listen to yourself. Trust yourself. Live your
own life and live it to the fullest.
Can I promise success? Frankly, no, if you think of
success in the popular terms of money and prestige and power. You
may achieve them, but I can't guarantee it. But if you look at
success in a different way- in what I firmly believe is a much more
satisfying way, then I think I can guarantee it. As Thoreau
tells us at the end of Walden, "I learned this, at least, by
my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of
his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will
meet with success unexpected in common hours. . . .If you have built
castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that's where they
should be. Now put the foundations under them."
And what will that success be like: Again I take
Thoreau's words from Walden: "If day and night are
such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like
flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more
immortal
—
that is
your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause
momentarily to bless yourself." You may not become a millionaire or
the President of the United States if you take your own way, but you
will have a satisfying life, a life without regrets. That I
can promise you. Now, go to it. Live your own life.
A
Note on the Text:
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Source: Geneseo Summer Compass (4
June 1984) in The Walter Harding Collection in the
Thoreau Society Collections. Minor typographical errors have been corrected
following Harding's typescript in The Walter Harding Collection in the
Thoreau Society Collections.
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