Errol Hill

Transcription

[ Pause ] >> Jamie Horton: Welcome, everyone. It's good to be here. It's nice to have you all. I'm delighted to be able to kick-off this Chalk Talk Series, celebrating the Year of the Arts, but before I go any further I just wanted to add a bit of additional biographical detail. On the 15th of May in the Jungle of Newell, in the heat of the day, in the cool of the pool, he was splashing, enjoying the jungle's great joys, when Horton, the elephant, heard a small noise. So Horton stopped splashing. He looked toward the sound, that's funny, thought Horton, there's no one around. Then he heard it again, just a very faint yelp, as if some tiny person were calling for help. I'll help you, said Horton, but who are you? Where? He looked and he looked, he could see nothing there but a small speck of dust blowing past through the air. I say, murmured Horton, I've never heard tell of a small speck of dust that is able to yell, so you know what I think, why I think there must be someone on top of that small speck of dust, some sort of a creature of very small size, too small to be seen by an elephant's eyes, some poor little person who is shaking with fear that he'll blow in the pool, he has no way to steer. I'll just have to save him because, after all, a person is a person, no matter how small. [ laughter] And so begins one of Theodor Geisel's celebrated stories, one particularly near and dear to my own heart because as a kid I was kidded for having the name, a name just the same as Horton, the elephant, of Dr. Seuss fame. [laughter] Theordor, Ted Geisel, Class of 1925, was far more famous by his pen name. Taking over the Jack-O-Lantern Editor in Chief position from Norman Maclean, whose work I'll be reading from later, Geisel was forced to resign after being discovered drinking gin in his room. [laughter] He created the pseudonym Seuss, originally pronounced Soice, in order to keep writing for the Jack-O. Geisel authored 46 children's books and his work has been adopted into plays, television specials, and feature films. On April 4th, 2012 the Dartmouth Medical School renamed itself the Geisel School of Medicine in honor of his family's extraordinary generosity to the College. So you know the rest or else it resides somewhere deep in memory, how Horton fights against all odds for the Who's of Whoville, through thin and through thick, to convince the Wickersham Brothers, the two kangaroos, and all his other doubters that the Who's do exist, really, rallying Whoville and its Honorable Mayor to make enough racket to be heard by all there. Great gusts of wild racket rang high through the air, they rattled and shook the whole sky, and the Mayor called up through the howling mad hullabaloo, hey, Horton, how's this, is our sound coming through? And Horton called back, I can hear you just fine, but the kangaroo's ears aren't as strong, quite as mine, they don't hear a thing, are you sure all your boys are doing their best, are they all making noise, are you sure every Who down in Whoville is working? Quick, look through your town, is there anyone shirking? Through the town rushed the Mayor, from the east to the west, but everyone seemed to be doing his best, everyone seemed to be yapping or yipping, everyone seemed to be beeping or bipping, but it wasn't enough. All this ruckus and roar, he had to find someone to help him make more. He raced through each building, he searched floor to floor, and just as he felt he was getting nowhere and almost about to give-up in despair, he suddenly burst through a door and that Mayor discovered one shirker, quite hidden away in the Fairfax Apartments, Apartment 12J. A very, very small shirker, named JoJo, was standing, just standing and bouncing a yoyo, not making a sound, not a yip, not a chirp. And the Mayor rushed inside and he grabbed the young twerp, and he climbed with the lad up the Eifelberg [assumed spelling] Tower. This, cried the Mayor, is your town's darkest hour, the time for all Who's who have blood that is red to come to the aid of their country, he said, we've got to make noises in greater amount, so open your mouth, lad, for every voice counts. Thus he spoke as he climbed. When they got to the top, the lad cleared his throat, and he shouted out, yup. And that yup, that one small extra yup put it over. Finally, at last, from that speck on that clover, their voices were heard, they rang out clear and clean, and the elephant smiled, do you see what I mean, they've proved they are persons no matter how small. And their whole world was saved by the smallest of all. How true, yes, how true, said the big kangaroo. And from now on you know what I'm planning to do? From now on I'm going to protect them with you. And the young kangaroo in her pouch said, me, too. From sun in the summer, from rain when it's fallish, I'm going to protect them no matter how smallish. [ Applause ] Horton Hears a Who, the first selection of six that I'd like to read for you today. All the writers that I've chosen attended Dartmouth. All graduated from Dartmouth except for one, Robert Frost. There were certainly other writers that would fit this particular bill, but some of them no doubt as prominent as the six chosen for today, but this is a brief encounter of the first kind on a fall football day at Dartmouth, so it's six. And by way of full disclosure in the interest of time I've also had to make a few judicious edits in the material that I've selected, but this is the kind of writing that inspires me, that has and will move generations, and it's a pleasure to speak these words. As Martha mentioned to you, I came to Dartmouth in 2005 before joining the Faculty in 2006, but in actuality that was my coming back. I began here quite a time before that. I was a graduate of Hannibal High School [assumed spelling] in 1972, and I had the great pleasure, early pleasure of my acting life to be invited to join the Dartmouth Summer Repertoire Company in 1972, where I was for three seasons. And it was during that time that I made some of my dearest friends, those who last through till today, and was mentored by my dear, dear friends, Rod Alexander and Errol Hill [assumed spelling], both of whom were some of my earliest and most treasured mentors. This was the period of my life when it became clear and then rapidly clear to me that acting was going to become a very, very important part of my life. And when I discovered what really, really made me tick and how I wanted to express those things, and when step by step, sometimes painful, I moved toward a career in the famously stable entertainment business. Not too far in time, coincidentally, from my last summer with the Dartmouth Summer Rep, my next reading is from Babes in Boyland, a personal history of coeducation in the Ivy League, by Gina Barreca, Class of 1979. Barreca writes with characteristic wit and unflinching honesty about the remarkable and often daunting experience of being a woman at Dartmouth at that time. Barreca is currently a Professor of English and Feminist Theory at the University of Connecticut. She is a Humorist and Author, as well as a noted public speaker. Her books have been translated into seven different languages, and she has appeared on a number of television and radio shows. From Babes in Boyland, a personal history of coeducation in the Ivy League - this book is called a personal history for several reasons, first among them that I've changed names and details in order to save friends, colleagues and instructors embarrassment. I've combined incidents, conflated experiences, and telescoped the chronology, but the entries from my journals are real, as are the conversations. Real, too, is the particular historical moment framing the book. I remember my years at Dartmouth with a combination of pride, astonishment, and affection. Of these three emotions astonishment dominates. October 1976, Brown Hall, rain and sleet drive against the one big window in our second floor room. I hear the weather before I open my eyes and scrunch my feet down to the very bottom of the narrow bed. Nobody should have to get up, let alone walk across campus to a comp lit class on Ibsen and Strindberg in this remorseless storm. It's late October, cold and dank, and no tourists come to New Hampshire for the scenery now. I have exactly 15 minutes to dress and get myself to class. Indifferent to the fluttering promises of perhaps finding true love between Brown Hall and the basement of Dartmouth Hall, where this class meets, I pull on jeans, wiggle into a soft wooly sweater, clomp into Frye [assumed spelling] boots, they can handle the rain, and take a halfhearted amateurish swipe at my face with lipstick and mascara. I look more like a commando than a coed, but by racing across the green I make it to class before the professor closes the heavy wooden door, as he does every morning at eight a.m. At eight a.m. exactly, before the last bell rings on top of Baker Library, no admission once the curtain is raised. Professor Fitz advised us on the very first day, if you're late you might as well go to a penny arcade for amusement. Six feet tall and built like an appliance, he has blonde hair cropped into a crew-cut so severe he could be in the Marines. He's probably 60 years old and speaks with a half English accent, sort of like David Niven. If you arrive late you forfeit the opportunity to be protected by this small outpost of knowledge. He often refers to the official Latin motto of the College, Vox Clamantis in Deserto, and adds I am the Vox, my dears, and this, here he swings out his arm to encompass all that lies around him, is the Deserto. You believe him. I make it to class, wet and shivering, grab my usual seat in the front, easier to stay awake, open my book and finally exhale. There are good reasons to be there on time, apart from being exiled to the Deserto. Fitz' preamble is usually the best part of the class, we hear about what the New York Times or Boston Globe printed in their morning editorials or what NPR had reported just a few minutes ago. Fitz, or as we called him amongst ourselves, Fitzie [assumed spelling], then magically connects the news of the day with what we'd been reading for class - property, real estate, family hatred, jealousy, covetousness, ambition, fear, they are at least as easily found in the daily papers as they are in Strindberg and Ibsen. Their past did not seem distant. Their struggles remain the same as ours. I like this teacher. I'm a little scared of him, not because he is demanding, which he is, but because I fear I won't live-up to his high expectations. I've done well so far. My first paper got a B+, and we've only just taken the midterm, which to my surprise I see he has already graded. Blue books are piled on top of the rickety wooden desk, which he circles when talking and leans against when listening. He uses the blackboard capriciously. By the end of the 75-minute class, emblazoned at the front of the room will be the following words - hoax, sadistic, sublimate, irreversible, and courage. Irreversible is underlined twice. He doesn't start today's class by telling us the news of the world, instead he explains that he was disappointed by many of our midterms. I asked you specific questions and you supplied me with general answers, he complains, he keeps his voice low and looks at us as if stricken you by our limited intelligence. I'm beginning to regret my front row seat because I can feel his reproach wash over me, gnawing at my empty stomach is the memory of having gone with Iris to watch the Film Club showing of Citizen Kane, when I should have been cramming for this exam. I shouldn't have convinced myself that because I love the plays, depressing as they are, I know how to analyze them. Some of you need to rethink your role as a student of this Institution. There is no justification for some of the prejudiciously tiresome writing on these pages. I am not a school mistress, cheaply appeased by the recitation of my own thoughts, I expect you to think for yourselves, as well as to provide a critical perspective on text you have carefully prepared. He sounds like the professor from last term's freshmen seminar. No sound from anyone. I will now read excerpts from a few of the better exams in order to provide you with examples of what is expected of you. I have my head down now, hiding under my hair, scrunched into the chair the way I earlier scrunched into my bed, waiting to hear monumental arguments provided by those classmates more suited to the rigors of academic life. Fitzie starts reading an essay on Ibsen's ghosts, and I'm thinking how I also wrote about hypocrisy, repressed sexuality and the ambiguous position of the female servant. I'm thinking about how I will never have an original idea, no matter how hard I try. And I'm doodling, as I always do, in the margins of my spiral notebook, when it begins to soak in, it's my essay he's reading. I look up. He has the front of the exam book folded back in an effort to keep it anonymous, but I see my scrawled notes on the inside jacket. This is unbelievable. I wrote one of the exams he likes. I wrote a midterm he is using as an example of what other people should aim for. I am listening to a professor read my words out loud, not because they are funny or weird or dead wrong but because they are good. I am one of the good students. After staring practically openmouthed with wonder at Fitzie, I put my head back down, and now doodle even more intently in the margin. I am hiding because I am blushing, which almost never happens, and because I am secretly grinning like a lunatic. The morning is perfect. [ Applause ] The year of the arts, a year in which we celebrate the power of art in our lives, art that can change the way we think, the way we feel, that can in some cases rearrange our very molecules. It's an exciting time for the College, the remarkable new Black Family Visual Arts Center, which was dedicated just yesterday, bold new planning initiatives in the Arts District, the celebration of the Hop's [assumed spelling] 50th birthday, among many other developments. The Department of Theater, of which I am a part, is proud to be a part of this very special year. We are producing Angels in America this fall, arguably one of the most important plays of the 20th Century. We will follow that up with David Ives adaptation of The Liar, by Pierre Cornet, a horse of a very different color. We are expanding our program by exploring new connections and collaborations with our theater alumni, the first of which is a group appropriately enough called Vox. We are taking part in the celebration of the Hop's 50th birthday, and most importantly perhaps, as do the rest of our colleagues in their own disciplines, we continue to nurture and train the important artistic voices of tomorrow. To the next reading then from the Class of '81, Annette Gordon-Reed. In addition to being an Author and Professor of Law at Harvard, Annette Gordon-Reed dramatically changed historical views on Thomas Jefferson when she published her investigation of Jefferson's then alleged affair with his slave, Sally Hemings. In 2008 Annette Gordon-Reed became the first African-American to win the Pulitzer Prize for history, and she has since been honored with, among other awards, a National Humanities Medal and a MacArthur Genius Grant Fellowship. The reading, following, is from her Pulitzer Prize winning, the Hemingses of Monticello, an American Family. Jefferson and those around him wished fervently that he would live to see the 50th anniversary of the signing of his Declaration of Independence. Early in the morning of the 4th of July, before the sun rose, he called out to the servants who were in the room with him, apparently telling them something he needed to have done. He talked for awhile and then went back to sleep. By midmorning when members of his white family were in the room, he looked over at his grandson, Jeff Randolph, and tried to communicate a request. Randolph did not understand what he asked for, but Burwell Colbert did. Jefferson wanted to be raised higher on his pillows. After Colbert adjusted the pillows the dying man was satisfied. About an hour later Jefferson fell unconscious, an hour after that he stopped breathing all together. In a coincidence, often thought providential, John Adams died later that same day in Quincy, Massachusetts, uttering before he died, Thomas Jefferson still survives. The statesman could not have engineered a more dramatic exit from the public stage, and in the case of Jefferson this stunning turn of events has received more attention than what immediately followed. As he wished it, the funeral of one of the most important men in history was a private ceremony in the graveyard at Monticello. John Hemings had been preparing for Jefferson's death for days, if not weeks, using the wood he had long been saving to make Jefferson's coffin. There was no extent record of who prepared Jefferson's body for burial, but if it was not Burwell Colbert it was probably female members of the enslaved community, for preparing bodies like bringing children into the world was generally considered woman's work. Wormley Hughes dug Jefferson's grave. His family members and slaves carried his body to the cemetery for what was a simple ceremony, a gathering of the Monticello community, enslaved and free, and people from nearby Charlottesville. This was not only the death of a man, everyone understood that this was the death of entire community. Members of Jefferson's white family were devastated by his loss and their own fears as they contemplated their financial ruin, but whatever happened they were still free and white. Even with the humiliation and pain they felt at the loss of status and wealth they had the basic attributes of privilege that would ensure that they could fall only so far, they had merely lost property, they were not the property that was going to be sold to pay their fathers' and grandfathers' debts. What Sally Hemings and other Hemings felt as they watched Jefferson being lowered into his grave is unknown. One can safely speculate that there were many varied and complex responses among them. They were of one family, but they bore different relationships to him, ranging from the small children who barely knew him, to the woman who had had seven children by him. Fifty-two years before Wormley Hughes dug Jefferson's grave his mother, Betty Brown, had come to Monticello as the 15-year-old ladies' maid to Martha Jefferson. Fifty-one years before John Hemings crafted Jefferson's coffin his mother, Elizabeth Hemings, and all of her children were assembled on the mountain. Their presence there was as long as and more continuous than Jefferson's and his white family's. That continuity and stability were never of their own making, and they could not have expected to be able to control their own destinies, but the specter of imminent bankruptcy brought much more uncertainty about the family's overall future during these days. There was something else, of course, Jefferson legally owned the Hemingses, but he and his white daughter and grandchildren were also blood relatives to some of them. He had lived for 38 years with a female member of the family. When Jefferson died, Beverly Harriet Madison and Eston Hemings lost their biological father, Sally Hemings lost the man with whom she had cast her lot when she was only a teenager, a situation common enough in their world seems almost unthinkable in ours. Aside from assuming that Sally Hemings was happy that Jefferson had kept his promises and that her children would be free people, we have little to go on in trying to imagine what the now 53-year-old woman felt when Jefferson was gone. Something is perhaps revealed in the items she decided to take with her when she left a Monticello that was soon to be stripped of everything. A pair of Jefferson's glasses, an inkwell, and one of his shoe buckles, things that she had seen him wear and use and that she knew were important to him, keeping these items and eventually giving them to her son as mementoes was a charge by the woman who apparently never spoke to outsiders about Jefferson to keep alive the memory of her and her children's connection to him. This was, however, only for her family. In the end she was as private about him as he was about her. It is often said that Americans lack a sense both of tragedy and of irony. Thorne Brodie [assumed spelling] very rightly called what happened on the mountain in 1826 and its immediate aftermath a Monticello tragedy. It was certainly that, but obviously much more, it was a national tragedy, the natural result of America's engagement with the institution of slavery, the doctrine of white supremacy and the nature of human frailty. The relationship of the Hemingses to the tragedy of slavery was unique, only because they happened to be owned by one who made himself a public man but wanted to keep private the world he really lived in with this particular African-American enslaved family. There is deep irony in this, too, what Jefferson accomplished for his children and some of their relatives was just what he stated could not be accomplished in the nation, as a whole. When freeing Burwell Colbert, Joseph Faucet [assumed spelling], John Hemings and Madison and Eston Hemings, the man who said that he believed it impossible for blacks and whites to live together in the United States and that people of African origin should be repatriated to another country, asked the Legislature to allow these men to remain not just in America, but in Virginia. By the time Jefferson died the American Colonization Society was up and running, and a few slave owners were freeing their slaves and making provision for their transportation to Liberia. They were acting on their deeply felt beliefs. What were Jefferson's likely true beliefs? The answer depends upon whether one chooses to pay more attention to what people say than to what they actually do. Why not send the men he freed to Liberia? Burwell Colbert's brother Brown would later opt to go there on his own. Jefferson gave the right answer to the question that likely never crossed his mind, the Hemingses should be allowed to remain in Virginia, he said, because that is where their families and connections were. That, of course, was the answer to the question why all other African-Americans, most of whose ancestors had come to America before or around the same time as the African woman who had borne Elizabeth Hemings, should be allowed to remain in the United States. Many of these people were the children, grandchildren, or great grandchildren of white men, just like the men he freed, their families and connections were in America, too. In truth, Jefferson did not mention race as the basis for the right to a home in America, at all. Longstanding family ties and memories created that right. As was often the case, the public rhetorical Jefferson was very different from the down-to-personal business Jefferson, the one he seldom wanted anyone to see. The personal Jefferson had dominated the lives of the Hemingses. Their family connections to him, first through his wife and John Wales [assumed spelling], and then the connections he created on his own with Sally Hemings, shaped the course of the family's existence. They also ensured that the world the Hemingses lived in with Jefferson would not be forgotten by their descendants and would remain a subject of fascination to the outside world. That is certainly not what Jefferson and his white family wanted, but thankfully they were not masters and mistresses across all space and time, and there is more to the world than law. The power of memory, love, and the strength of family kept alive the Hemingses' story, that we remember them today is the best and most fitting tribute to the no doubt terrified and unknown African who arrived on the shores of Virginia so many years ago to begin this family's saga. [ Applause ] Just a footnote here, this passage had a particular resonance for me, as my wife and I had just visited Monticello this past fall when I was on location, playing a very small role in Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, which I shot, but I don't know yet if I'm really in. [laughter] It was my first visit to Monticello, and the history is so palpable, present there, it really sparks the imagination. I want to read from the work of two exceptional Dartmouth poets, Robert Frost and Louise Erdrich. First, Robert Frost, considered one of the best American poets of all time, Frost was raised in Lawrence, Massachusetts after the death of his father when he was 10. Sick throughout his life, Frost attended Dartmouth for two months, in the class of 1896, and later Harvard for two years. He sold his first poem at age 20 and went on to win four Pulitzer Prizes for his poetry. Despite never graduating from college, himself, he has received over 40 honorary degrees. Frost is the only person who has received two honorary degrees from Dartmouth. These are a few of my favorite Frost poems. October -- O hushed October morning mild, thy leaves have ripened to the fall. Tomorrow's wind, if it be wild, should waste them all. The crows above the forest call, tomorrow they may form and go. O hushed October morning mild, begin the hours of this day slow. Make the day seem to us less brief. Hearts not averse to being beguiled, beguile us in the way you know. Release one leaf at break of day, at noon release another leaf, one from our trees, one far away. Retard the sun with gentle mist, enchant the land with amethyst. Slow, slow! For the grapes' sake, if they were all, whose leaves already are burnt with frost, whose clustered fruit must else be lost -- for the grapes' sake along the wall. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening -- Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village, though. He will not see me stopping here to watch his woods fill up with snow. My little horse must think it queer to stop without a farmhouse near, between the woods and frozen lake, the darkest evening of the year. He gives his harness bells a shake, to ask if there is some mistake. The only other sound's the sweep of easy wind and downy flake. The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep. Birches - you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to change my plan, I was going to read to you, but I think I may not have time for it, Swinging Birches, which is also - there are so many in this collection, but I'm going to move instead to the poetry of Louise Erdrich now. Louise Erdrich, Class of 1976, same class year as Martha, I believe, belongs to the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa in Minnesota. She is a critically acclaimed Author of Native American literature and poetry. She was in one of the first classes of women at Dartmouth, where she met her future, now late, husband, Michael Dorris, who was the first Director of Dartmouth's renowned Native American Studies Program. Louise's stories and poetry flow from the places, people, and experiences of her own Turtle Mountain Chippewa Tribe, and she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2009. I'd like to thank my colleague, Vera Palmer, Professor of Native American Studies, for her invaluable insights into Erdrich's work, and I'd also like to thank Diana Lawrence [assumed spelling] and Kate Barlow in the Office of Alumni Relations for their help in setting up this talk. So from Louise Erdrich's Jacklight. The first is a poem called Captivity, which is based on the narrative of the Captivity of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, who was taken prisoner by the Wampanoag [assumed spelling] when Lancaster, Massachusetts was destroyed in the year 1676. The stream was swift and so cold I thought I would be sliced in two, but he dragged me from the flood by the ends of my hair. I had grown to recognize his face, I could distinguish it from the others. There were times I feared I understood his language, which was not human, and I knelt to pray for strength. We were pursued by God's agents or pitch devils, I did not know, only that we must march. Their guns were loaded with swan shot. I could not suckle, and my child's wale put them in danger. He had a woman, with teeth black and glittering, she fed the child milk of acorns. The forest closed, the light deepened. I told myself that I would starve before I took food from his hands, but I did not starve. One night he killed a deer with a young one in her and gave me to eat of the fawn. It was so tender, the bones like the stems of flowers, that I followed where he took me. The night was thick. He cut the cord that bound me to the tree. After that the birds mocked, shadows gaped and roared, and the trees flung down their sharpened lashes, he did not notice God's wrath. God blasted fire from half-buried stumps. I hid my face in my dress, fearing he would burn us all, but this, too, passed. Rescued, I see no truth in things. My husband drives a thick wedge through the earth, still it shuts to him year after year. My child is fed of the first wheat. I lay myself to sleep on a hollen-laced [assumed spelling] pillow bier. I lay to sleep, and in the dark I see myself as I was outside their circle. They knelt on deerskins, some with sticks, and he led his company in the noise, until I could no longer bear the thought of how I was. I stripped a branch and struck the earth in time, begging it to open to admit me, as he was, and feeding me honey from the rock. And one more from Louise, I think I will choose Night Sky, a poem about a lunar eclipse for Michael Dorris, and a quick footnote, Arcturus is the orange giant star, the brightest in the Northern Celestial Hemisphere. You probably all know that, I didn't, so I bring it up because I think it helps make one heck of a lot more sense out of this poem, so beautiful as it is. Arcturus, the Bear Driver, shines on the leash of hunting dogs. Do you remember how the woman becomes a bear because her husband has run in sadness to the forest of stars? She soaks the bear hide until it softens to fit her body. She ties the skinning boards over her heart. She goes out, digs stumps, smashes trees to test her power, then breaks into a dead run and hits the sky, like a truck. We are watching the moon when this bear woman pulls herself arm over arm into the tree of Heaven. We see her shadow clasp the one rusted fruit, her thick paw swings, the world dims. We are alone here on earth with the ragged breath of our children, coming and going in the old wool blankets. Does she ever find him? The sky is full of pits and snag dead falls. She sleeps in shelters he's made of jack pine, eats the little black bones of birds he's roasted in cook fires, she even sees him once, bending to drink from his own lips in the river of starlight. The truth is she cannot approach him in the torn face and fur, stinking of shit and leather. She is a real bear now, licking bees from her paws, plunging her snout in anthills, rolling mad in the sour valleys of skunk cabbage. He knows she is there, eyeing him steadily from the horn beam, as she used to across the table. He asks for strength to leave his body at the river, to leave it cradled in its sad arms, while he wanders in oiled muscles, bear heft, shag, and acorn fat. He goes to her, heading for the open, the breaking moon. Simple, to tear free, stripped and shining, to ride through crossed furs. [ Applause ] I'm going to read you one more, but before I do I just wanted to say a word about my own creative inspiration. Acting, particularly at the college level, is all about the process of self-discovery. Whether or not the student will ever set foot on a stage after college, it is about training and discipline, yes, but it is first and foremost a process by which you open new doors inside yourself, realizing that you are, in fact, much bigger than you thought possible, that you can draw on those deeper reserves as you move ahead in your life. This is one of the things that has accounted for the enormous popularity of Acting One in our Department. Year after year students from all areas of interest, who have taken that course, testify to the fact that it is a truly transformative experience, a game changer, that they somehow know themselves better as a result of this art, that, as I said earlier, it has in some way changed the very shape of their molecules. That I think is the reward, the promise of the arts, one that I have clung to. And if it can happen once, it can happen again, which is fundamentally why I teach, fundamentally why I live my artistic life for the joy of discovery, the joy of striving always to learn the next lesson in my craft, the next moment of real aha. My last reading from Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It. When I was a boy, this is my own words, not Norman's yet - when I was a boy my father took me into our backyard in England, put a fly rod in my hand and told me to practice casting until I could reliably lay the line over a newspaper some 30 feet away, the perfect activity for a boy with a touch of the obsessive compulsive. When I ran triumphantly into the house and told them to come watch me do it, which I did with pride, he told me, good, good, now do it with the other hand. I have some wonderful memories of fishing as a kid, though I don't count myself a fisherman, certainly not anymore, the obsessiveness has changed its aim now and golf has become that obsessive compulsive part of me. But all those memories of fishing were eclipsed by the beauty of the story I read many years later, A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean, Class of 1924. Originally from a small town in Iowa, Maclean spent his teenage years working for the U.S. Forest Service in Montana. As a Dartmouth student he was in both Beta Pheta Pi [assumed spelling] and Sphinx [assumed spelling], and he served as Editor in Chief of the Jackolantern, yes, just before Theodor Geisel. After two postgraduate years teaching at the College Maclean moved to Chicago, where he got married and completed a Ph.D. at the University. His most famous works were written after his retirement from the University of Chicago in 1973, and include A River Runs Through It and other stories. A River Runs Through It, as you know, was later made into a film starring Brad Pitt, in which there are some truly, truly striking, striking images of this story. I pick-up the story just after Paul, played by Pitt in the movie, has caught perhaps the biggest fish of his life. This was the last fish we were ever to see Paul catch. My father and I talked about this moment several times later, and whatever our other feelings we always felt it fitting that when we saw him catch his last fish we never saw the fish, but only the artistry of the fisherman. My father always felt shy when compelled to praise one of his family, and his family always felt shy when he praised them. My father said you are a fine fisherman. My brother said I'm pretty good with a rod, but I need three more years before I can think like a fish. Remembering that he had caught his limit by switching to George's number two yellow hackle with a feather wing, I said without knowing how much I said, you already know how to think like a dead stonefly. We sat on the bank and the river went by, as always, it was making sounds to itself, and now it made sounds to us. It would be hard to find three men sitting side by side who knew better what a river was saying. On the Big Blackfoot River above the mouth of Belmont Creek the banks are fringed by large Ponderosa Pines. In the slanting sun of late afternoon the shadows of great branches reached from across the river and the trees took the river in their arms. The shadows continued up the bank until they included us. A river, though, has so many things to say that it is hard to know what it says to each of us. As we were packing our tackle and fish in the car Paul repeated just give me three more years. At the time I was surprised at the repetition, but later I realized that the river somewhere, sometime must have told me, too, that he would receive no such gift, for when the police sergeant early next May wakened me before daybreak I rose and asked no questions. Together we drove across the Continental Divide and down the length of the Big Blackfoot River, over forest floors, yellow and sometimes white with glacier lilies, to tell my father and mother that my brother had been beaten to death by the butt of a revolver and his body dumped in an alley. My mother turned and went to her bedroom, where in a house full of men and rods and ruffles she had faced most of her great problems alone. She was never to ask me a question about the man she loved the most and understood least. Perhaps she knew enough to know that for her it was enough to have loved him. He was probably the only man in the world who had held her in his arms and leaned back and laughed. When I finished talking to my father he asked is there anything else you can tell me? Finally, I said nearly all the bones in his hand were broken. He almost reached the door and then turned back for reassurance, are you sure that the bones in his hand were broken, he asked? I repeated nearly all the bones in his hand were broken. In which hand, he asked? In his right hand, I answered. After my brother's death my father never walked very well again. He had to struggle to lift his feet and when he did get them up they came down slightly out of control. From time to time Paul's right hand had to be reaffirmed, then my father would shuffle away again. Like many Scottish ministers before him he had to derive what comfort he could from the faith that his son had died fighting. For some time, though, he struggled for more to hold on to. Are you sure you have told me everything you know about his death, he asked? I said, everything. It's not much, is it? No, I replied, but you can love completely without complete understanding. That I have known and preached, my father said. Once my father came back with another question, do you think I could have helped him, he asked? Even if I might have thought longer I would have made the same answer, do you think I could have helped him, I answered? We stood, waiting in difference to each other, how can a question be answered that asks a lifetime of questions? After a long time he came with something he must have wanted to ask from the first, do you think it was just a stick-up and foolishly he tried to fight his way out? You know what I mean, that it wasn't connected with anything in his past? The police don't know, I said. But do you, he asked? And I felt the implication. I've said I've told you all I know. If you push me far enough all I really know is that he was a fine fisherman. You know more than that, my father said, he was beautiful. Yes, I said, he was beautiful, he should have been, you taught him. My father looked at me for a long time, he just looked at me. So this was the last he and I ever said to each other about Paul's death. Indirectly, though, he was present in many of our conversations. Once, for instance, my father asked me a series of questions that suddenly made me wonder whether I understood even my father, whom I felt closer to than any man I have ever known. You like to tell true stories, don't you, he asked? And I answered, yes, I like to tell stories that are true. Then he asked after you have finished your true story sometime why don't you make-up a story and the people to go with it? Only then will you understand what happened and why it is those we live with and love and should know who elude us. Now nearly all those I love and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them. Of course, now I am too old to be much of a fisherman and now, of course, I usually fish the big waters alone, although some friends think I shouldn't. Like many fly fishermen in western Montana, where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening, then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and a hope that a fish will rise. Eventually, all things merge into one and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters. Thank you. [ Applause ] Thank you very, very much.