Newsletter Ecole d'Humanité

4 January | Januar 2013
the
von der Schulleitung
from the directors
the
January | Januar 2013 5
Roughly Zones
Graduation Speech 2012
Ashley Curtis MA 1988–1993, 1995–2004, Director since 2009
happiness, or deeper living – okay or not okay Don’t look for a
handbook of regulations. It’s your call.
Your call. From now on a lot of things are your call. Try to call
well. But not too well. And not always well. Don’t plant your peach
tree in the Arctic, but don’t always follow the rules in the gardening
book, either. No risk, no fun. But on the other side: no limit, no life.
I like to give the graduating seniors a symbolic present with
their diplomas. This year I give you a poem and a peach. “There
Are Roughly Zones” is in your diploma case. The peaches are in
this basket. Eat the peach soon, or it will rot. The poem has been
around since 1936, and will survive.
A bunch of people, or maybe just a couple, sit around a wood stove
in a farmhouse in the middle of winter while a storm rages outside.
They’re worried about the peach tree that they planted in the fall.
This wind and this cold may be too much for it, and it may die on
this night, and never bear leaves again. They question why they
insisted on planting a peach tree so far north, in such a climate, and
blame it on the human tendency not to accept reasonable limits.
Here’s the poem, by Robert Frost:
We sit indoors and talk of the cold outside.
And every gust that gathers strength and heaves
Is a threat to the house. But the house has long been tried.
We think of the tree. If it never again has leaves,
We’ll know, we say, that this was the night it died.
It is very far north, we admit, to have brought the peach.
What comes over a man, is it soul or mind---
That to no limits and bounds he can stay confined
You would say his ambition was to extend the reach
Clear to the Artic of every living kind.
Why is his nature forever so hard to teach
That though there is no fixed line between wrong and right,
There are roughly zones whose laws must be obeyed
There is nothing much we can do for the tree tonight,
But we can’t help feeling more than a little betrayed
That the northwest wind should rise to such a height
Just when the cold went down so many below.
The tree has no leaves and may never have them again.
We must wait till some months hence in the spring to know.
But if it is destined never again to grow,
It can blame this limitless trait in the hearts of men.
You’re now finishing up your 2, or 3, or 4, or 5, or 7, or 9 years
at the Ecole and are about to head off into the big world out there.
The Ecole is a very strange place for a number of reasons, one of
which is its special combination of freedoms and limitations. There
aren’t many other places where students can ski glaciers, make
swords, milk goats, and solve elaborate murder mysteries and call
it all school, where they can talk to their teachers who are also their
parents and hike leaders and cleaning supervisors with so few rules
of engagement, or where it is so easy to invent and offer activities
and courses, from Michael Schreier’s Imaginary Television to Nutella
Tasting in all its variations. On the other hand, 17-year-olds are expected
to be in their houses or the library by 8.15 at night, not to
smoke, drink, game, surf, text, toke, tube, twitter, watch dvds or even
go to local restaurants. That these rules are actually fictions, that
they pretend to be against certain activities but are mainly there to
clear away some time and space for other things – like the freedoms
I just mentioned – is something you’ve certainly figured out by now.
We think our rules, within our context, are generally helpful, for
a time. But for you, that time is over. (Or will be in a few days, don’t
get me wrong.) But what then During your adolescence these rules
provided you with guidelines, in certain areas, about what is okay
and what is not okay. How will you answer those questions now
What is okay to do and what is not okay This question
sometimes tortures many of us, and if it gains the upper hand in
our consciousness, it can even lead to lives deformed by indecision
and guilt. Certain people, on the other hand, seem to breeze right
past it – some with admirable lightness and grace, others leaving
destruction and hurt in their paths.
What is okay to do and what is not okay I obviously can’t
give you an answer, but what I want to do is give you a poem. It’s
the one I quoted at the beginning of this talk, and the title, which I
haven’t yet told you, is “There Are Roughly Zones.” This title comes
from one of the lines in the poem, which reads: “though there is
no fixed line between wrong and right,/ There are roughly zones
whose laws must be obeyed.”
Ecole rules draw some pretty fixed lines between wrong and
right – it’s time for you to leave these now. And I recommend that
you not believe that such fixed lines really exist at all, because belief
in their existence can lead either to fanaticism or to the indecisive
guilt I described above. On the other hand, there are roughly zones
whose laws must be obeyed. Stepping outside of these zones is
both dangerous and hurtful. And lightness and grace come from
somewhere in between, from a recognition that you yourself decide
where to go and where to stop, you and no one else, but that going
too far will damage both yourself and others.
My favorite line in the poem is, “It is very far north, we admit,
to have brought the peach.” The people in the poem, obviously,
are either very close to or have crossed over into a rough zone
where peach trees simply can’t survive. There are several wonderful
things about this situation. One is that they won’t know for
months whether the tree has survived or not – it will look just the
same until spring, and only when the leaves come out, or don’t,
will they be able to tell what really happened in the storm they’re
experiencing now. The consequences of your decisions often aren’t
apparent for a long time, if they ever are. We live with ambiguities.
Another thing I like in the line is its absurdity: “It is very far north,
we admit, to have brought the peach.” Without its context it’s a
whacky sentence, and you would have no idea what it means. And
what I particularly like is the kind of rueful good humor I hear in
it, a kind of, well, we may be idiots, but it was worth a shot, wasn’t
it Sort of reminds me of asking a student in our family, who we’ll
call Joe to protect his semi-innocence – if he had taken the bus
to Reuti (not allowed), and the sheepish grin he gave me when he
finally answered, “well, yeah, kind of.”
But best of all, it’s a peach. Succulent, sweet, juicy, delicious
– what’s more pleasurable than a peach (Don’t answer that.) The
people in the poem may have strayed somewhat into the wrong
zone, but it was in the name of pleasure, sweetness, life. And they
didn’t stray too far – they didn’t, as the poem later reminds us,
bring the peach tree “clear to the Arctic”.
Sometimes we risk a tree. And sometimes we risk other things,
including a little moral consistency, for the pursuit of pleasure, or
Spore forming capsule of a moss covered with ice