Cabot House Commencement Speech
Cabot House, Harvard College
Richard Johnston
May 24, 2012
A few weeks ago, I made my first trip to the “Friendly Confines” – Wrigley Field – the home of the
Chicago Cubs – that 98-year-old cathedral to baseball with ivy-covered outfield walls nestled in the
Chicago suburbs between West Addison St, North Clark St, Waveland Ave, and Sheffield Ave. It’s
the spiritual home of Harry Carey, who was still leading the crowd in “Take Me Out To the
Ballgame” when I was a child. It’s the home of Ernie Banks, who played all of his nineteen seasons
with the Cubs, and whose number was retired in 1982, five years after his election into the Major
League Baseball Hall of Fame.
A few people here today will probably boo me for saying this, but I think Wrigley Field is the most
spectacular ballpark in the United States. After all, it’s a true neighborhood ballpark. All the game
were day games until August 8, 1988, when the baseball gods, in disapproval of the newly installed
lights, stopped the first night game after three and a half innings with a rain storm. My first trip to
Wrigley Field was bound to be special under any circumstances, but a person named Kris Medlen
made it especially memorable. As I was watching batting practice from the outfield bleachers, Kris
Medlen, a relief pitcher for the Atlanta who was born in 1985, when I was nine years old and still
dreaming of playing professional baseball, noticed a fan in a Braves t-shirt surrounded by Cubs fans,
and tossed me a ball. Kris Medlen is in his fourth season with the Braves, so throwing the occasional
ball to a fan is probably old hat for him by now, and if he were here today he probably wouldn’t
remember me, but the fact is he made that day, and I will always remember it, and him.
In 1798, when he was just 28 years old, the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth wrote a
famous poem called “Tintern Abbey.” The complete title of the poem is actually “Lines written a
few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, July 13, 1798.”
Wordsworth gave the poem such a long title because he wanted to commemorate the occasion.
Recently reunited with his sister Dorothy, from whom he had been separated during childhood, and
whom he addresses at the end of the poem as his “dearest Friend,” Wordsworth was revisiting a
place he had first seen five years previously, at the age of 23. The world had changed so much since
then, and he had grown up so much, but the banks of the Wye had remained the same, and his sister
Dorothy was seeing them for the first time. Wordsworth drew comfort from both of these things.
My favorite lines in the poem come in the second paragraph. There, the poet reflects on the
rejuvenating powers of childhood memories and scenes, saying: “mid the din / of towns and cities, I
have owed to them / In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, / Felt in the blood, and felt along the
heart.” He then goes on to speculate on the influence of these memories on what he calls “best
portion of a good man’s life, / His little, nameless, unremembered acts / Of kindness and of love.”
It’s really a remarkable statement: the idea that the best part of one’s life are not his or her
vocational accomplishments, things we commemorate with diplomas, medals, trophies, and the like,
but acts of kindness and love so small that it would be hard to hang a name on them, and, more
importantly, so habitual that one may not even remember performing.
But that adjective “unremembered” in Wordsworth’s poem refers to the doer of the action, not its
recipient. For the recipient, that little, nameless act of kindness and of love might be deeply and
vividly remembered – much like the scuffed ball tossed by a baseball player to a fan sitting in the
Wrigley Field bleachers. All of you graduating today have already done, and will continue to do,
great things. A few of you, for better or for worse, will achieve fame for your accomplishments, or
perhaps notoriety. Many of you will not. In fact, some of you will probably get to a point in your
lives where you wonder whether what you’re doing with your lives has “lived up to” the
expectations that the diplomas and other testimonials hanging on your wall seem to require. I want
today to release you from these fears, by reminding you of the fact that the best portion of a your
life may not be visible, may not even be remembered by you, but will be remembered and honored
by others. I speak for everyone on this stage when I say that during the past three years you have
touched each of us with your passions and personalities, your kindness and energy. It’s for this
reason we give out the Semper Cor awards each year. And it’s for this reason we received so many
nominations from so many different students for so many different students. So the message I want
to leave you with is: keep being the kind and loving people you are, because, while you may not
succeed in making this deeply troubled world a palpably better place, you’ll make life richer and
more beautiful for the people you share it with.
That’s all I want to say. But because I’m leaving Cabot House and Harvard to become an obscure
English professor, and because I will probably never address more than 20 or 30 people at a time for
the rest of my life, except perhaps at the weddings or funerals of my vastly more successful friends, I
want to mark what I’ve said here today by paying forward Kris Medlen’s unremembered act of
kindness to me, and to indulge for just a moment in my childhood dreams of playing professional
ball. So here are two baseballs, decorated with the Cabot shield and marked with today’s date, which
I’m going to toss to the crowd. Good luck to you all. Semper cor.