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| Biting the apple of knowledge |
“The best thing for being sad,’ replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, ‘is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in you anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then – to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags in it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn – pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics – why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plough.”
T.H. White, The once and Future King
First of all God bless Burke's school and our brilliant, possibly alcoholic, never-would-be-hired today teacher Mr. Bell for having us read The Once and Future King. Never knew it would come in so handy for a quote for Chico's graduation.
I always find graduation season melancholy. I don't like saying goodbye to a place that has embraced my kid while sprinkling fairy dust of knowledge on his head. I don't like saying goodbye to his friends, and ours, and in both cases (Exeter and Chicago), to places that we will not see very often again. Sigh. And as excited and happy and proud as the parents are at these times, in my experience, the graduate tends to be exhausted and emotional and disorganized.
But anyway, we came we clapped we packed. And young F, while very sad and slightly weepy to say goodbye, bounced back as usual. (Weebles wobble but they don't fall down. Do you remember that commercial from the 70s?). Frederick is a weeble. The summer ahead looks rather good and he gets to start studying in London in October, season pass to Lech in hand. So there is that consolation.
Martha was in full Martha mode: dressed like the Queen mother on the days when she gardens- flowered dress, straw hat, sensible shoes- racing around like friendly paparazzi. She was trying to brag about F, but at this sort of graduation, these attempts fall laughably short. She tried the whole astro physics thing to a guy whose daughter was getting her PHD in chemistry. For every cum laude she came up with, there was a magna to contend with. No matter. Martha is nothing if not good at the pivot- we heard her telling people "her grandson double majored in Astrophysics and Astrophysics." In her eyes, he is more that just a budding Astrophysicist.
He is a double stuffed one.
I told Thomas F seemed to have come, somehow into full adulthood. It's like a border has been crossed, a certain shyness dissipated, a new confidence born. As proof, he came home and immediately cleaned out his closet of old clothes and then started work on two of the three jobs he has this summer. True, two of those are unpaid, but Frederick is a purist, and he seems to have mastered the art of working for little or nothing, then going seriously long in the stock market.
I marvel at how lucky F was to have landed here of all places. A place that, according to a long research project analyzing "top" colleges, puts UChicago highest in the intellectual category. It's the place where the kids talk about what they are learning if they ever in fact go to a party. F told Andrew that is was not uncommon for him to study an extra 8 hours after a day of classes; and yet I wonder if he would say fun did come to die here. I don't know that he would. Interestingly, his closest people at the end were all women. Women with whom he cooked dinner and shared break up stories, and one time when I phoned him, with whom he had gone antiquing. (insert smiley face). His last semester was spinkled with all sorts of exotic things like parties and dates and sunrise swims in the lake. These things did not really happen in the early years on the road to his double stuffed major.
He said he is more attached to Exeter than Chicago as much as he liked it. Part of that is Covid, part of that might just be that first love is first love.
I realize this is meant to have more photos...and I will provide, just as soon as the Queen Mother returns from Canada with her camera. (She can't apparently download from abroad...)
more in a jiffy xxx
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| Bestie and Roommate Angelina |
