Isn’t it great to be here today? Isn’t it great to be graduating? What could be better than this…a beautiful day in Southern California; proud parents and friends around you; the semester’s over; summer’s coming. Life is good, isn’t it? The poet W.D. Snodgrass wrote, "There is a loveliness exists/preserves us, not for specialists." I think it’s important to embrace that loveliness and keep our eyes on it. When I was a young man I used to go to the movies in Times Square and it was a big event. This was Times Square before it turned into the media circus it is today. I used to have coffee at the Mayflower Coffee Shop there, and I’ll always remember a slogan that was painted on the wall: "As you wander on through life, brother, whatever be your goal, keep your eye upon the donut, and not upon the hole."

All of you English majors, of course, will recognize that that’s a metaphor. It’s difficult, in today’s world, to keep your eye on that donut. The world is filled with distractions, seductions, digressions, and just plain awful things. As the first post-September 11th graduating class, you have experienced, in the last year especially, a particularly large dose of that awfulness. None of us will ever forget the sight of those colossal World Trade Towers crumbling…and that calamitous event has been followed by the devastation of Afghanistan, the ongoing tragedy of the Middle East, the continuing spread of fear through terrorism throughout the world. As a civilization, we have started the 21st century very badly. It’s hard to imagine a crueler and more violent century than the twentieth, with its genocidal brutalities, and its horrific catalog of wars as a solution to human problems. But this century has begun in an even more brutal way.

So given this state of affairs, what is it I should be talking about on this, your graduation day? I want to talk about a word that seems the antithesis of all this, and one you rarely hear discussed at a university: Love. Despite the fact that so much of our literature revolves around love, we feel uneasy talking about it in relation to our actual lives. Recently, I sent an e mail to the English department suggesting certain changes in the English major, and trying to define what we in the department have in common as English teachers, despite our wide range of differing specialties. This was the last paragraph of the e mail: "We teach students how to read critically and analytically; we try to give them a sense of the value of well expressed ideas; we try to develop something of an esthetic sense--so that students can tell the difference between good and bad writing; we try to show them why literature matters--how it has made a difference in our lives and can make a difference in theirs; we model as teachers for them, since many of them will go on to be teachers; we show how language can be corrupted and misused. In short, we teach them to pay attention to words, to use them well and with care, to fall in love with great books. What? did I say "love"??? Yes, I did...."

A colleague of mine, responding to that last sentence wrote "I am uncomfortable, Fred, with ending up with "love" because "love" is ultimately unteachable. The actual marriage age in the sixteenth century and how it relates to Romeo and Juliet is entirely a different story." Well, I want to suggest to both my colleague and to all of you, that not only is love teachable, but it’s probably the most important thing that we can teach. We are uncomfortable with it at the university because we are the repository of intellectuality and rationality in our world, and there is nothing less rational in human experience than love. There are also few words more misused and treated more shabbily in our discourse, particularly in the rhetoric of advertising and pop culture. It’s hard to know what anyone means by it anymore. T.S. Eliot prefaced his "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" with a quotation from Dante’s Inferno, anticipating the hell that the word would suffer in a mass society where some people, like Erich Segal, who wrote the immensely popular novel Love Story in the early seventies, think that love means "never having to say you’re sorry," and others, like Bob Dylan, tell us that "Love is just a four letter word." We love our mothers, our Hondas & Mustangs, our baseball teams and movie stars, as well our favorite ice-cream flavors and pizza toppings. The word along with a picture of a cherub adorns the #1 selling U.S. postage stamp, and occurs often in the titles of porno movies, religious sermons, new age self-help guides, romantic novels, and tv shows, including Jerry Springer, who recently did a show on "Fathers who love their daughter’s boyfriends." (Or was it "Mothers who love their girlfriend’s daughters?"?I can’t be sure)

A story I particularly like to teach in my literature classes, and one students almost always have a strong response to is Raymond Carver’s "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love." The story involves two couples in their thirties sitting around a kitchen table drinking booze and talking about the meaning of love. It begins in bright light and ends in darkness, suggesting that the more we talk about it, the less we know about it (especially when that talk is lubricated by a bottle and a half of gin, which is what the characters consume). One of the characters, a man named Mel, is a heart surgeon, and right in the middle of the story, he delivers a long, semi-drunken monologue on love and what has happened to it in our time. Let me just quote a portion of that monologue:

"’What do any of us really know about love?’ Mel said. ‘It seems to me we’re just beginners at love. We say we love each other and we do, I don’t doubt it. I love Terri and Terri loves me, and you guys love each other too... But sometimes I have a hard time accounting for the fact that I must have loved my first wife too. But I did, I know I did…. ‘There was a time when I thought I loved my first wife more than life itself. But now I hate her guts. I do. How do you explain that? What happened to that love? What happened to it, is what I’d like to know. I wish someone could tell me…You guys have been together eighteen months and you love each other. It shows all over you. You glow with it. But you both loved other people before you met each other. You’ve both been married before, just like us. And you probably loved other people before that too, even.

We all recognize what Mel is talking about here, don’t we? It’s serial monogamy, which has largely replaced lifelong monogamy as the "normal" state of affairs? certainly it has here in Southern California. I’m not making a judgment here as to whether this is good or bad…only that it’s basically a fact. Mel goes on:

Terri and I have been together five years, been married for four. And the terrible thing, the terrible thing is, but the good thing too, the saving grace, you might say, is that if something happened to one of us?excuse me for saying this?but if something happened to one of us tomorrow, I think the other one, the other person, would grieve for a while, you know, but then the surviving party would go out and love again, and have someone else soon enough. All this, all of this love, we’re talking about, it would be just a memory. Am I wrong? Am I way off base? Because I want you to set me straight if you think I’m wrong. I want to know. I mean, I don’t know anything, and I’m the first one to admit it.’"

Mel’s confused, drunken monologue has a kind of terrible clarity and honesty to it. This is the sort of love we too often live with in our contemporary world… a fragile and temporary love, capable of turning into its opposite at a moment’s notice. This sort of love is bewildering because it’s not transcendent, as we continue to hope love can be, but rather transient, shifting its allegiances from one day to the next. People who once felt so close to one another become courtroom adversaries.

I don’t think this means that we ought to give up hope about love, but rather that we deepen our experience of it. Instead of thinking of love only in a romantic and personal way, what if we think about it in a deeper, more spiritual sense? I know that word "spiritual" makes some people nervous?especially at a public university, but I want to assure you that I’m not talking about religion in the ordinary sense of that word at all. In fact, though I intend no offence to anyone religious here, it certainly can be argued that religion right now is the source of many of the world’s woes. In many parts of the world, it divides people and pits their beliefs against one another. Too many religions believe they have a monopoly on truth?and that the rest of us are infidels. Spirituality, on the other hand, stresses our similarities?what we have in common as human beings living on this planet at this time.

Love’s closest companion is compassion, and what the world needs now, as Burt Bacharach put it, is not only "love, sweet love," but a very strong dose of compassion to go along with it. When we relate love to compassion we are talking neither about romantic love nor the love of books, but rather about the sort of love we can get OUT of books. The more great literature we read, the more we recognize that the suffering of others is no different from our own, and to empathize with the suffering of others is love’s greatest gift. This is what liberates us from the prisons of our own selves and selfishness. This is what ennobles humanity and brings forth its most heroic and enduring efforts. This is the task of your generation, and especially of your children’s generation.

It’s our challenge as human beings to realize that war is always a failure of the human imagination, and it’s our privilege, as students of literature, to be the custodians of that imagination. We need to report the results of our investigation of that imagination more fervently than ever. Literature shows us what it’s like to live in a skin other than our own…and there is nothing, let me repeat that NOTHING, we need more desperately to experience at this moment in human history. Of course understanding what it’s like to live in circumstances other than the ones you are familiar with is only a beginning of making changes in the world, but it’s an essential beginning, and no one in this graduating class of 2002 is better equipped to take that initial step than you are.

We, as citizens of the United States, a country that has been for so long now the hope and inspiration of the world, need to understand, for example, what it’s like to experience life as a Palestinian and as an Israeli. We need to understand these things because our nation is, as Walt Whitman so eloquently pointed out, "a teeming nation of nations." We need to inhabit the consciousness of both the Protestants and the Catholics in Ireland, of both the Hindus and the Muslims in India, both the Christians and the Muslims in the Baltics. Although we recoil from the terrible suffering these divisions have brought about, we need to recognize what drives people to desperation like flying airplanes into buildings and strapping explosives to their bodies, or blowing up trains. It’s easy, of course, to empathize and have compassion for people we can easily relate to?like, for example, the young men and women who have been victimized by Catholic priests; it’s much more difficult, of course, to have some compassion for the priests themselves, because they have abused their trust and betrayed those who had faith in them. But surely those terrible and unspeakable acts are the products of twisted, tortured and suffering minds.

In the face of all the world’s violence, terror, and destructive capacities, the only response that does not multiply and replicate that violence and destruction is a loving response. Recently, I wrote a poem about the 9/11 disaster which uses the words of some of the victims of that disaster as a mantra for our time. I think it’s astonishing that in the face of death, what virtually all of these victims thought of was love…to connect with those they loved in the world and to assure them of their love. All of us ought to heed those "messages from the sky," from the planes and the towers…love and again, love.

They evoke for me the words of Ezra Pound, who wrote while imprisoned in a cage in Pisa at the end of World War 2, "What thou lov’st well remains/The rest is dross

What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee/What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage." I say to you on this wonderful graduation day of 2002, seize your true heritage; love well, for that is a gift you give not only to yourself but to the world.

Thanks very much.