Dr. Scott Boehnen: 2009 Rice Inspirational Teaching Award winner
Dr. Scott Boehnen won this year’s Anton and Lydia Rice Inspirational Teaching Award, presented at this year’s Senior Class Dinner. In his dinner remarks Scott explores friendship and the meaning of “Enter Here to Be and Find a Friend.”
Dr. Scott Boehnen won this year’s Anton and Lydia Rice Inspirational Teaching Award, presented at this year’s Senior Class Dinner. In his dinner remarks Scott explores friendship and the meaning of “Enter Here to Be and Find a Friend.”
In celebration of their 50th and 45th Hackley reunions, Don '57 and Bill Rice '62 endowed this monetary award to celebrate teaching excellence at Hackley. The award is presented every year to a member of the faculty designated by majority vote of the graduating class who, in the opinion of the members of the class, “has lit and sustained the fire of learning and inspiration, stimulated their intellectual curiosity and inspired them in positive ways to seize the day and grasp the challenges they will face in the years ahead.”
Scott began teaching at Hackley in 2005 when the graduating class of 2009 entered the Upper School. Throughout their four years, they would often see him on the sidelines of their games; they would invite him to chaperone their events; and follow his sage advice in taking our newspaper The Dial, to award-winning excellence.
Scott earned his Ph.D and masters degree in English Literature from Stanford University and a bachelors degree in English from Notre Dame; where he graduated summa cum laude and served as his class Valedictorian as well the award winner of the Elenaor Meehan medal for distinguished literary criticism in 1993. Prior to teaching English at Hackley, Scott served as the Head of High School English at the American School in London. While at ASL, he was awarded the James McGovern Award or Teaching Excellence in 1999 and lead volunteer of school sponsored trips to South Africa, Ireland, Spain and Yorkshire, England.
In addition to his Hackley teaching responsibilities, Scott sits on the Scheduling/Calendar and Professional Development Committees and serves as a Faculty Advisory to student organizations and Admissions Representative to the Casten Family Foundation – 2007 trip to Indonesia. In 2008, on behalf of Hackley, Scott accepted the first place award for Overall Excellence from the Westchester Country Journal News for Hackley’s school newspaper, the Dial.
Scott Boehnen • Senior Dinner speech • Hackley School • June 3, 2009
Thank you, Andre, for that kind and humbling introduction, and thanks to Don and Bill Rice for endowing this award. Anyone who entertains knows that these events don’t just happen, so thanks to the hard-working members of the committee who put this dinner together, especially the august trio of Mary Dell Berning, Doriann Hersh, and Debbie Lederman. But most of all, thanks to the class of 2009 for inviting me to this podium tonight.
During his final exams at Oxford, which were oral exams, Oscar Wilde was asked to translate from a Greek version of the New Testament. The examiners chose a familiar part, the story of the Last Supper. According to reports, “Wilde began to translate, easily and accurately. The examiners were satisfied, and told him that was enough. Wilde ignored them and continued to translate. After another attempt, the examiners at last succeeded in stopping him, and told him that they were satisfied with his translation. ‘Oh, do let me go on,’ said Wilde, ‘I want to see how it ends.’”
But we already know how this, the fiftieth annual Senior Dinner ends—namely, with the class of 2009 scattering to different states, regions of the country, eventually to different parts of the globe.
I begin with the Oscar Wilde anecdote because the subject of his translation, the Last Supper, is, at a profound level, a story of friendship. And, in sharing this meal tonight, we, too, are engaged in some of the core activities of friendship—eating good food, talking, and laughing. And friendship is the theme of my remarks tonight, a traditional Hackley theme. But I hope that you’ll see this theme in a new light, that you might feel some of Wilde’s wonder as you reflect on your own experience of friendship with those sitting around you right now. You might think of one of your Hackley friends as I make these remarks. My hope is that you will think somewhat differently about a subject that you already know a lot about.
To structure my thoughts I want to reflect on the eight words inscribed above Hackley’s main entrance, up on the Hilltop—words that almost everyone here knows by heart. But mentally we’re going to begin at the bottom of the hill, at the stone gates that mark this place, Hackley School, in plain white letters. I want you to imagine yourself next to those gates. The Benedict Avenue field is to the left, maybe with Coach Arnold’s Olympian voice echoing over his lacrosse players. There is a beautiful copper beech tree to the right of the gates, one said to have been brought from the Netherlands as a seedling. Further up the hill stands Gage House, and beyond it, the old oak of the main quad.
Now, can you answer this question: How steep is the incline from the stone gates to the top of the hill?
(The answer is actually four degrees, but that’s not my point.) Researchers at the University of Virginia took thirty-four students to the base of a hill, loaded them with heavy backpacks, and asked them the same question, “How steep is the incline?”
And here’s what they found: “The students who stood with friends gave a lower estimate of the steepness of the hill. And the longer the friends had known each other, the less steep the hill appeared.”
Other researchers found that attachment to one person, such as a spouse, did not reduce the risk of heart attack, but having friends did. A lack of friendship was second only to smoking as a risk factor for fatal heart disease.
So friendship is good for us. But it doesn’t get much attention in the media or in advertising because it is one of the few human activities that resist commercialization. The same cannot be said of its flashy cousin, eros, or romantic love. Eros is the celebrity in some sexual-industrial complex, the one that gives us trashy novels and pop music, cosmetics and movie stars. But there is no such friendship industry, no product that helps us buy or keep a friend.
So I want to give friendship its due—because it’s important to your health; because Mrs. Hackley apparently wanted you to experience it in its truest form, and here; and because it has been the most significant dimension of my own experience at Hackley, with members of this senior class.
Part I.
The famous Hackley lintel says, “Enter here to be and find a friend.”
That first word, “enter,” plainly suggests the purpose of a door—something we would not have expected the early Hackley boys, much less our current students, to need reminding of. It’s interesting, too, that we have this celebrated entrance to the school but no clearly marked exit, a fact that may have troubled you, at least subconsciously—especially for the lifers among us, still wondering how to get out of this place.
But I think that command verb, “enter,” was meant to invite us on a journey that continues today. Your first step through that door was the start of a journey that is meant to have no end. Or, more accurately, the start of a journey that finds its end in every step. You see, there is something good, intrinsically, about this kind of journey—one that sharpens your intellect, broadens your perspective, and expands your capacity to love. And it is good to take such a journey together, learning “to live well, with and for others.”
“Everything good is on the highway,” Ralph Waldo Emerson said. Everything good lies there, at the roadside, even when we believe we are speeding toward some important destination. I think of that quotation whenever I walk gingerly through the senior corridor—a place littered with backpacks and books, a place teeming with things and people. Everything good is around me. I’m forced to slow down to avoid tripping. I’m forced to take note of the activities of friendship—a handshake, a fist-bump, an embrace. You’ll see those beautiful moments captured in the slideshow to come.
We call ourselves a “college-preparatory” school, but I hope you have come to recognize that the moments of friendship you have experienced here are continuous with—not preparatory for—the life you will lead elsewhere.
Part II.
The word “here” is what linguists call a deictic word, one that points directly, specifically. As such it asks us to think about what makes this place, here, special.
Some images immediately come to mind for me: taking a class outside to sit in a circle and discuss The Great Gatsby on the Astroturf below us; the countless blue-books crammed with distinctive handwriting—sometimes illegible but also so expressive of personality and so little seen in this digital age; the view of Pickert Field from the bottom of the dark, tree-lined hill, when it’s already ablaze with light for one of the October football games.
But such images imply that “here” is a place, rather than a moment and a relation. I think that we create the momentary “here” whenever two or three are gathered, sharing in some common purpose. To be “here” is to feel the immediacy of another person’s presence and to be open to change in that relation.
As such, friendship is the opposite of what economists call fungible goods: things that are interchangeable or exchangeable, like dollar bills or Snickers bars—any one being as good as any another. The miracle of friendship lies in its specificity.
In one of his darker moments, one of my students imagined what his life would have been if he had chosen his local public school over Hackley. At the tender age of eighteen, he was already fatigued by the 12,000 miles he had logged just in commuting back and forth to school since his junior year—which is to say nothing of the 100,000 miles his mother claims to have logged before he got his license! Hackley had taught him how to write (something he wasn’t sure would have happened at his local school), and Hackley had given him a best friend, he said. But he was ambivalent even about having a best friend at Hackley. After all, having a best friend who lived in the neighborhood would have been easier because at least they could see each other more often on the weekends, and without complicated layers of planning and without driving back and forth on 287. I’m sure you can sympathize with his plight.
But something struck me as wrong about that model of friendship at the time, though I didn’t know how to respond. He was too close to the subject to realize how much his best friend had changed him. To imagine a best friend at Briarcliff, for example, and best friend at Hackley—and then to compare which would be better—is to make a fundamental mistake: namely, to assume that you, the self who enters into the relation of friendship, remain unchanged. That the best friend is fungible, or interchangeable.
But the relationship of friendship is, or should be, mutually changing—so much so that to imagine yourself with another best friend is to imagine yourself as a different person. And that’s as impossible as being in two places at once, Tarrytown and Briarcliff.
The word “here” invites us to think about particularity. Why this person, at this time, and in this place?
“It is enough that these particulars speak to me,” Emerson wrote. “A few anecdotes, a few traits of character, manners, face, a few incidents, have emphasis in your memory out of all proportion to their apparent significance, if you measure them by the ordinary standards. . . .What the heart thinks is great is great. The soul’s emphasis is always right.”
Part III.
“To be and to find”
This part of the inscription seems to get things backward: How can one “be” a friend before “finding” one? The answer again lies in Emerson, who wrote the following sentence in his wonderful essay “Friendship”: “The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.” Our Hackley inscription is probably a loose paraphrase of that sentence.
“The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.”
“Virtue” is the key word here—a translation of the ancient Greek word aretê or excellence. A runner displays the aretê or excellence of his feet, and a soldier’s aretê lies in his courage. In pointing to the excellence that accompanies the performance of a role, Emerson is inviting us to imagine the virtues or excellences of a friend. Trustworthiness, selflessness, generosity, equality, and truthfulness come to mind.
The important point is that these things stem from action, not (as most people think) from feelings. The modern, non-Emersonian view is that a friend is a person for whom you feel affection—someone you like. But Emerson, along with the ancient Greeks, would see friendship not as an emotional state, but rather as an activity. And, as activities, the virtues of friendship can be practiced—perhaps must be practiced—before you “find” a friend. One practices being truthful, generous, and trustworthy by choosing particular actions in particular situations, especially the hard situations. So Emerson’s essay has frequent reference to the “practices” of friendship—its virtues or excellences—rather than to its feelings. Affection attends the practice of friendship but is not the content of friendship.
If we focus on these practices of friendship then we also see how this particular relationship helps to create our communal relationships. Insofar as particular friends are practicing the virtues of trustworthiness, selflessness, and equality, so too our community comes to be characterized by those virtues. If friendship were simply affection, it would have little social function—or perhaps a fickle and divisive one, the stuff of cliques. But as a set of virtues, friendship creates community. That’s why Aristotle argued that friendship is a more important aim than even justice. Friendship creates community, while justice merely redresses failures within a community already created.
So if we were to take Emerson and Aristotle to heart here at Hackley, we would address our own failures as failures of friendship, rather than of justice or of law.
“To find” a friend, in Emerson’s view, means “to discover” a person with whom you practice the virtues of friendship. Such a discovery is, at once, miraculous and wholly expected. Miraculous insofar as friendship “cancels the thick walls of individual character, relation, age, [gender], and circumstance,” according to Emerson. But expected insofar as such a miraculous relation has been carefully prepared for, just as an athlete might practice the virtues associated with running.
Part IV.
That verb “find” is also critically important in defining Emerson’s notion of a friend, the last word in our inscription. Emerson uses “to find” as the antonym of the word “to seek,” and imbedded in that word choice is a caution. We should not “seek” a friend, Emerson writes, because to do so is to “appropriate [him] to ourselves.” The true friend never tries to appropriate—to seek and to possess the other.
And, in fact, a friend can never be possessed. And here we come to Emerson’s paradoxical definition of a friend: he or she is a “beautiful enemy.” Emerson wrote, “Let [the friend] be forever a sort of beautiful enemy, untamable, devoutly revered, and not a trivial conveniency to be soon outgrown and cast aside.” In contrast, the things we possess can—and eventually will—be thrown away.
Thus, it’s “better to be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo,” Emerson argues. An echo reproduces your own voice, always with some distortion—likely how you’d want to hear yourself. Like a mirror, an echo flatters our vanity. A nettle, a prickly branch, does quite the opposite.
The popular formulation of Emerson’s point is that the friend tells you what you need to know, not what you want to hear. But there’s a second point implied by Emerson’s metaphor of the “beautiful enemy” or the nettle: The true friend goads us toward change and in so doing becomes an enduring part of who we are. We don’t possess the friend but rather enter into a mutually created, mutually challenging relationship. Recognizing that power to change who we are, we should hold our friend in as much reverence as we would hold a worthy enemy. We should remain alert and inventive—open to discovering our better selves in relation to the “beautiful enemy” whom we love.
Without denigrating the fire of romantic love, Emerson prefers the steadier flame of friendship. “[Friendship] is for aid and comfort through all the passages of life and death,” he writes. “It is fit for serene days, and graceful gifts, and country rambles, but also for rough roads and hard fare, shipwreck, poverty, and persecution.”
If we already know how this story ends—the geographical dispersal of the class of 2009, beginning in August—we also know that the happiness we feel now, today, will eventually be punctuated by severe trial, and perhaps already has been for many of you. I have no advice for the 95 members of the class of 2009. But if you take anything from these remarks, I hope it is this: the resource for your thriving, even in hard times, is all around you—at these very tables. Cherish it and nourish it.
You all have the experience of carrying heavy backpacks, and they were a literal, physical part of that experiment at the University of Virginia. But I think those backpacks have symbolic meaning too. You don’t yet know what heavy burden life is going to put in your backpack, but you’ll feel it, gradually or suddenly. The particular content of that backpack doesn’t matter. The important part is to realize that you will be standing—and you will be hiking—next to someone. And, together, the incline will seem gentle.
Whether you’ve been at Hackley for three years or for thirteen, my hope is that you have indeed “entered here to be and find a friend.”
May you continue to live lives of friendship in the fullest sense of that word.
And thank you for the friendship you have shown me.
________________________________
1) James Sutherland, ed., The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes (London: Oxford, 1975).
2) Tara Parker-Pope, “What Are Friends For? A Longer Life,” The New York Times, April 21, 2009.
3) The phrase is from Paul Ricoeur. See Oneself as Another, tr. K. Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Thanks to Amy Daughton for pointing me in this direction.
4) All quotations of Ralph Waldo Emerson are from Emerson’s Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1951).
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In celebration of their 50th and 45th Hackley reunions, Don '57 and Bill Rice '62 endowed this monetary award to celebrate teaching excellence at Hackley. The award is presented every year to a member of the faculty designated by majority vote of the graduating class who, in the opinion of the members of the class, “has lit and sustained the fire of learning and inspiration, stimulated their intellectual curiosity and inspired them in positive ways to seize the day and grasp the challenges they will face in the years ahead.”
Scott began teaching at Hackley in 2005 when the graduating class of 2009 entered the Upper School. Throughout their four years, they would often see him on the sidelines of their games; they would invite him to chaperone their events; and follow his sage advice in taking our newspaper The Dial, to award-winning excellence.
Scott earned his Ph.D and masters degree in English Literature from Stanford University and a bachelors degree in English from Notre Dame; where he graduated summa cum laude and served as his class Valedictorian as well the award winner of the Elenaor Meehan medal for distinguished literary criticism in 1993. Prior to teaching English at Hackley, Scott served as the Head of High School English at the American School in London. While at ASL, he was awarded the James McGovern Award or Teaching Excellence in 1999 and lead volunteer of school sponsored trips to South Africa, Ireland, Spain and Yorkshire, England.
In addition to his Hackley teaching responsibilities, Scott sits on the Scheduling/Calendar and Professional Development Committees and serves as a Faculty Advisory to student organizations and Admissions Representative to the Casten Family Foundation – 2007 trip to Indonesia. In 2008, on behalf of Hackley, Scott accepted the first place award for Overall Excellence from the Westchester Country Journal News for Hackley’s school newspaper, the Dial.
Scott Boehnen • Senior Dinner speech • Hackley School • June 3, 2009
Thank you, Andre, for that kind and humbling introduction, and thanks to Don and Bill Rice for endowing this award. Anyone who entertains knows that these events don’t just happen, so thanks to the hard-working members of the committee who put this dinner together, especially the august trio of Mary Dell Berning, Doriann Hersh, and Debbie Lederman. But most of all, thanks to the class of 2009 for inviting me to this podium tonight.
During his final exams at Oxford, which were oral exams, Oscar Wilde was asked to translate from a Greek version of the New Testament. The examiners chose a familiar part, the story of the Last Supper. According to reports, “Wilde began to translate, easily and accurately. The examiners were satisfied, and told him that was enough. Wilde ignored them and continued to translate. After another attempt, the examiners at last succeeded in stopping him, and told him that they were satisfied with his translation. ‘Oh, do let me go on,’ said Wilde, ‘I want to see how it ends.’”
But we already know how this, the fiftieth annual Senior Dinner ends—namely, with the class of 2009 scattering to different states, regions of the country, eventually to different parts of the globe.
I begin with the Oscar Wilde anecdote because the subject of his translation, the Last Supper, is, at a profound level, a story of friendship. And, in sharing this meal tonight, we, too, are engaged in some of the core activities of friendship—eating good food, talking, and laughing. And friendship is the theme of my remarks tonight, a traditional Hackley theme. But I hope that you’ll see this theme in a new light, that you might feel some of Wilde’s wonder as you reflect on your own experience of friendship with those sitting around you right now. You might think of one of your Hackley friends as I make these remarks. My hope is that you will think somewhat differently about a subject that you already know a lot about.
To structure my thoughts I want to reflect on the eight words inscribed above Hackley’s main entrance, up on the Hilltop—words that almost everyone here knows by heart. But mentally we’re going to begin at the bottom of the hill, at the stone gates that mark this place, Hackley School, in plain white letters. I want you to imagine yourself next to those gates. The Benedict Avenue field is to the left, maybe with Coach Arnold’s Olympian voice echoing over his lacrosse players. There is a beautiful copper beech tree to the right of the gates, one said to have been brought from the Netherlands as a seedling. Further up the hill stands Gage House, and beyond it, the old oak of the main quad.
Now, can you answer this question: How steep is the incline from the stone gates to the top of the hill?
(The answer is actually four degrees, but that’s not my point.) Researchers at the University of Virginia took thirty-four students to the base of a hill, loaded them with heavy backpacks, and asked them the same question, “How steep is the incline?”
And here’s what they found: “The students who stood with friends gave a lower estimate of the steepness of the hill. And the longer the friends had known each other, the less steep the hill appeared.”
Other researchers found that attachment to one person, such as a spouse, did not reduce the risk of heart attack, but having friends did. A lack of friendship was second only to smoking as a risk factor for fatal heart disease.
So friendship is good for us. But it doesn’t get much attention in the media or in advertising because it is one of the few human activities that resist commercialization. The same cannot be said of its flashy cousin, eros, or romantic love. Eros is the celebrity in some sexual-industrial complex, the one that gives us trashy novels and pop music, cosmetics and movie stars. But there is no such friendship industry, no product that helps us buy or keep a friend.
So I want to give friendship its due—because it’s important to your health; because Mrs. Hackley apparently wanted you to experience it in its truest form, and here; and because it has been the most significant dimension of my own experience at Hackley, with members of this senior class.
Part I.
The famous Hackley lintel says, “Enter here to be and find a friend.”
That first word, “enter,” plainly suggests the purpose of a door—something we would not have expected the early Hackley boys, much less our current students, to need reminding of. It’s interesting, too, that we have this celebrated entrance to the school but no clearly marked exit, a fact that may have troubled you, at least subconsciously—especially for the lifers among us, still wondering how to get out of this place.
But I think that command verb, “enter,” was meant to invite us on a journey that continues today. Your first step through that door was the start of a journey that is meant to have no end. Or, more accurately, the start of a journey that finds its end in every step. You see, there is something good, intrinsically, about this kind of journey—one that sharpens your intellect, broadens your perspective, and expands your capacity to love. And it is good to take such a journey together, learning “to live well, with and for others.”
“Everything good is on the highway,” Ralph Waldo Emerson said. Everything good lies there, at the roadside, even when we believe we are speeding toward some important destination. I think of that quotation whenever I walk gingerly through the senior corridor—a place littered with backpacks and books, a place teeming with things and people. Everything good is around me. I’m forced to slow down to avoid tripping. I’m forced to take note of the activities of friendship—a handshake, a fist-bump, an embrace. You’ll see those beautiful moments captured in the slideshow to come.
We call ourselves a “college-preparatory” school, but I hope you have come to recognize that the moments of friendship you have experienced here are continuous with—not preparatory for—the life you will lead elsewhere.
Part II.
The word “here” is what linguists call a deictic word, one that points directly, specifically. As such it asks us to think about what makes this place, here, special.
Some images immediately come to mind for me: taking a class outside to sit in a circle and discuss The Great Gatsby on the Astroturf below us; the countless blue-books crammed with distinctive handwriting—sometimes illegible but also so expressive of personality and so little seen in this digital age; the view of Pickert Field from the bottom of the dark, tree-lined hill, when it’s already ablaze with light for one of the October football games.
But such images imply that “here” is a place, rather than a moment and a relation. I think that we create the momentary “here” whenever two or three are gathered, sharing in some common purpose. To be “here” is to feel the immediacy of another person’s presence and to be open to change in that relation.
As such, friendship is the opposite of what economists call fungible goods: things that are interchangeable or exchangeable, like dollar bills or Snickers bars—any one being as good as any another. The miracle of friendship lies in its specificity.
In one of his darker moments, one of my students imagined what his life would have been if he had chosen his local public school over Hackley. At the tender age of eighteen, he was already fatigued by the 12,000 miles he had logged just in commuting back and forth to school since his junior year—which is to say nothing of the 100,000 miles his mother claims to have logged before he got his license! Hackley had taught him how to write (something he wasn’t sure would have happened at his local school), and Hackley had given him a best friend, he said. But he was ambivalent even about having a best friend at Hackley. After all, having a best friend who lived in the neighborhood would have been easier because at least they could see each other more often on the weekends, and without complicated layers of planning and without driving back and forth on 287. I’m sure you can sympathize with his plight.
But something struck me as wrong about that model of friendship at the time, though I didn’t know how to respond. He was too close to the subject to realize how much his best friend had changed him. To imagine a best friend at Briarcliff, for example, and best friend at Hackley—and then to compare which would be better—is to make a fundamental mistake: namely, to assume that you, the self who enters into the relation of friendship, remain unchanged. That the best friend is fungible, or interchangeable.
But the relationship of friendship is, or should be, mutually changing—so much so that to imagine yourself with another best friend is to imagine yourself as a different person. And that’s as impossible as being in two places at once, Tarrytown and Briarcliff.
The word “here” invites us to think about particularity. Why this person, at this time, and in this place?
“It is enough that these particulars speak to me,” Emerson wrote. “A few anecdotes, a few traits of character, manners, face, a few incidents, have emphasis in your memory out of all proportion to their apparent significance, if you measure them by the ordinary standards. . . .What the heart thinks is great is great. The soul’s emphasis is always right.”
Part III.
“To be and to find”
This part of the inscription seems to get things backward: How can one “be” a friend before “finding” one? The answer again lies in Emerson, who wrote the following sentence in his wonderful essay “Friendship”: “The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.” Our Hackley inscription is probably a loose paraphrase of that sentence.
“The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.”
“Virtue” is the key word here—a translation of the ancient Greek word aretê or excellence. A runner displays the aretê or excellence of his feet, and a soldier’s aretê lies in his courage. In pointing to the excellence that accompanies the performance of a role, Emerson is inviting us to imagine the virtues or excellences of a friend. Trustworthiness, selflessness, generosity, equality, and truthfulness come to mind.
The important point is that these things stem from action, not (as most people think) from feelings. The modern, non-Emersonian view is that a friend is a person for whom you feel affection—someone you like. But Emerson, along with the ancient Greeks, would see friendship not as an emotional state, but rather as an activity. And, as activities, the virtues of friendship can be practiced—perhaps must be practiced—before you “find” a friend. One practices being truthful, generous, and trustworthy by choosing particular actions in particular situations, especially the hard situations. So Emerson’s essay has frequent reference to the “practices” of friendship—its virtues or excellences—rather than to its feelings. Affection attends the practice of friendship but is not the content of friendship.
If we focus on these practices of friendship then we also see how this particular relationship helps to create our communal relationships. Insofar as particular friends are practicing the virtues of trustworthiness, selflessness, and equality, so too our community comes to be characterized by those virtues. If friendship were simply affection, it would have little social function—or perhaps a fickle and divisive one, the stuff of cliques. But as a set of virtues, friendship creates community. That’s why Aristotle argued that friendship is a more important aim than even justice. Friendship creates community, while justice merely redresses failures within a community already created.
So if we were to take Emerson and Aristotle to heart here at Hackley, we would address our own failures as failures of friendship, rather than of justice or of law.
“To find” a friend, in Emerson’s view, means “to discover” a person with whom you practice the virtues of friendship. Such a discovery is, at once, miraculous and wholly expected. Miraculous insofar as friendship “cancels the thick walls of individual character, relation, age, [gender], and circumstance,” according to Emerson. But expected insofar as such a miraculous relation has been carefully prepared for, just as an athlete might practice the virtues associated with running.
Part IV.
That verb “find” is also critically important in defining Emerson’s notion of a friend, the last word in our inscription. Emerson uses “to find” as the antonym of the word “to seek,” and imbedded in that word choice is a caution. We should not “seek” a friend, Emerson writes, because to do so is to “appropriate [him] to ourselves.” The true friend never tries to appropriate—to seek and to possess the other.
And, in fact, a friend can never be possessed. And here we come to Emerson’s paradoxical definition of a friend: he or she is a “beautiful enemy.” Emerson wrote, “Let [the friend] be forever a sort of beautiful enemy, untamable, devoutly revered, and not a trivial conveniency to be soon outgrown and cast aside.” In contrast, the things we possess can—and eventually will—be thrown away.
Thus, it’s “better to be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo,” Emerson argues. An echo reproduces your own voice, always with some distortion—likely how you’d want to hear yourself. Like a mirror, an echo flatters our vanity. A nettle, a prickly branch, does quite the opposite.
The popular formulation of Emerson’s point is that the friend tells you what you need to know, not what you want to hear. But there’s a second point implied by Emerson’s metaphor of the “beautiful enemy” or the nettle: The true friend goads us toward change and in so doing becomes an enduring part of who we are. We don’t possess the friend but rather enter into a mutually created, mutually challenging relationship. Recognizing that power to change who we are, we should hold our friend in as much reverence as we would hold a worthy enemy. We should remain alert and inventive—open to discovering our better selves in relation to the “beautiful enemy” whom we love.
Without denigrating the fire of romantic love, Emerson prefers the steadier flame of friendship. “[Friendship] is for aid and comfort through all the passages of life and death,” he writes. “It is fit for serene days, and graceful gifts, and country rambles, but also for rough roads and hard fare, shipwreck, poverty, and persecution.”
If we already know how this story ends—the geographical dispersal of the class of 2009, beginning in August—we also know that the happiness we feel now, today, will eventually be punctuated by severe trial, and perhaps already has been for many of you. I have no advice for the 95 members of the class of 2009. But if you take anything from these remarks, I hope it is this: the resource for your thriving, even in hard times, is all around you—at these very tables. Cherish it and nourish it.
You all have the experience of carrying heavy backpacks, and they were a literal, physical part of that experiment at the University of Virginia. But I think those backpacks have symbolic meaning too. You don’t yet know what heavy burden life is going to put in your backpack, but you’ll feel it, gradually or suddenly. The particular content of that backpack doesn’t matter. The important part is to realize that you will be standing—and you will be hiking—next to someone. And, together, the incline will seem gentle.
Whether you’ve been at Hackley for three years or for thirteen, my hope is that you have indeed “entered here to be and find a friend.”
May you continue to live lives of friendship in the fullest sense of that word.
And thank you for the friendship you have shown me.
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1) James Sutherland, ed., The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes (London: Oxford, 1975).
2) Tara Parker-Pope, “What Are Friends For? A Longer Life,” The New York Times, April 21, 2009.
3) The phrase is from Paul Ricoeur. See Oneself as Another, tr. K. Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Thanks to Amy Daughton for pointing me in this direction.
4) All quotations of Ralph Waldo Emerson are from Emerson’s Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1951).
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Previous Anton and Lydia Rice Inspirational Teaching Award Winners
- Seth Karpinski: Anton and Lydia Rice Inspirational Teaching Award winner announced
- Dr. Scott Boehnen: Selected for Rice Inspirational Teaching Award
- Andy King: Inaugural Recipient Rice Inspirational Teaching Award
Dial Articles of Interest:
- Despite Tough Times, Seth Karpinski Is Wicked Happy Coaching and Teaching, By Dial reporter Anna Carroll ’10, Dial, October 2008
- Lecture Series Aims to Inspire, By Dial reporter Katie Ruffing ’09, Dial, May 2009
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