Commencement SpeechClark University, May 19, 2002Michael Staton ‘02
We are here now. Our first day seemslike not too long ago. I can see itclearly in the bottle of my life'smemories (it's at the top), separatedfrom me now by the bottleneck of the recent semester or so. Our memories are ordered by the ones wefeel the most, not by the increments of time they came in. We are here now, peering into that bottle,having completed our first third.Life is divided into thirds sometimes. Education, Career, Retirement. Mind, Body, Soul. Social,Economic, Political. Cash, Debit, Credit. Heaven, Hell, Purgatory. In our first third, we read some books.Papers came out of the printer and the hand scribbled out tests. Notes fell onto some paper and flewinto a filing cabinet or a trash can. Parties convened and flocked away at flashlights. Organizationslabored to get the attention of the few people in between too busy or too lackadaisical or too naïve tocare. Teams prepared to conquer NEWMAC and more importantly find discipline and each other. Our best resolutions were submitted to, debated on, and sometimes passed by the ongoing conference of the cafeteria. Friends stayed up too late talking. Love kept us feeling because it was there, because itwasn't, or because it wouldn't go away when we wanted it to leave. Individuals listened in class for concepts and information and spent productive time not listening so that they could imagineer the future,sort out memories, create fantasies and dreams, and store them all into a database out the window intothe sky or into a corner of a classroom. That was us. Those are our memories.A Professor, who must remain nameless, once told a story about some researchers who received agrant. They were hard at work, but their findings all described the issue as just really complicated. Thefunding agency was not amused, and had a reaction that the professor summarized as: "We could havetold you that. What do you think we are paying you for?" In there somewhere, he said it is the job of academia to reduce the complicated to the understandable.When I came to Clark I knew a solid little and assumed college would help make sense of things for me -teach me the structure of the universe, planet earth and our species in it. We all know aboutassumptions: now, that little I knew is less solid, and I sometimes feel like I am drowning in complexity.Thanks to our beloved liberal arts curriculum, I have learned that all the academic skills, disciplines, andperspectives through which we can examine "the all around us," combine into a sliced up version of verycomplicated. And I think to myself: "I could have told you that, what was I paying College for?" Therewas no warning explicitly stated in my acceptance letter or by my faculty advisors. My mother informsme it was not in microprint at the bottom of the bills, and I checked the website everywhere. So, I wonder if now is a good time to ask for my money back.But just as you and I are about to file suit, we notice in the hopelessness of the infinity of words andequations and books and computer screens, lost in the darkness of our own thoughts, that we candoggy paddle in this ocean of nonsense; it's a struggle, but we are surviving. So now, I guess I amconcluding that schooling, this first third, isn't necessarily coming to understand the architecture of thegrand scheme of things, but rather learning to swim the currents of the confusing.
Michael Staton ‘02
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