![]() ![]() I had zero interest in my father’s war experience-and that was fine with him. He just told some funny stories and-more or less un-discussed-kept an old Japanese rifle hanging from a peg over his writing desk. They can watch a hundred documentaries on it, and they can talk about it for hours. Now a whole generation of middle-aged men cannot get enough of World War II. But certainly there was history, day after day of it. There were no poets or philosophers on those ships, or maybe there were only poets and philosophers. Soon enough, my teenage father was in Officer Candidate School, and then he was on a destroyer in the Pacific. The next morning-Monday, December 8-virtually every man in that college walked into town, chose a branch of the armed services, and enlisted. News of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor arrived on a Sunday afternoon in December. Those students knew that the world was rumbling around them, but they were in a New England college studying the poets and philosophers, and it was easy to imagine that the world was far away. He thought he was finally free, but history found him. This was a long, long time ago, the freshman year of Thomas Flanagan. This was in the old days, when you sent your laundry home to your mother, wore a jacket and tie to class, attended compulsory Protestant chapel, and did anything else the dean of students told you to do. He was finally free of the repressive Catholicism he’d grown up with, he was surrounded by free thinkers, and he was at last in a place where his great talent-writing-was valued above all others. He was a new student at Amherst College, and he thought it was paradise. History also found my father when he was in college, although he was a freshman, not a senior. That part of your life had ended, and you never got to say goodbye to it. As your long, strange spring break was extended week after week, the truth began to settle in: You were never going back to college. Why not?Īn event that will change the way we live was sweeping around the globe, and it found you. No matter how many graduations I attend-and no matter how much of a hassle it is to get a parking space and catch the shuttle bus and find a seat-when the line of graduates finally appears and begins that last, long walk as college students, I feel like I might cry.īut you won’t get to have this very special event, four years in the making. We want the day to be distinct, unmistakable, and linked to countless ceremonies of the past. ![]() And for many decades we have celebrated it in the same formal way-with pomp, circumstance and a lexicon of special terms- academic regalia processing down the aisle conferring of degrees. ![]() A college graduation is a big deal it’s important. With losses on that order, it might seem frivolous to feel sad about losing your graduation ceremonies. Many of you, I know, have suffered these things too. Others have lost their jobs, their savings, their plans for the future. People have lost their lives, and families are grieving. This has been a season of terrible losses. Isn’t there supposed to be some sheet cake involved? Not this year, I guess. Find the collection here.Īs I stand here on this glorious spring morning, wearing my day pajamas and staring out the window at my garbage cans, I can’t help thinking something’s wrong. Editor’s Note: This article is part of a series of commencement addresses commissioned by The Atlantic for students who will not be able to attend their graduations because of the pandemic. ![]()
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