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At college commencement, president in academic regalia stands at the podium.
Middlebury President Laurie Patton delivers the Baccalaureate address to the Class of 2020 during their Commencement ceremony on Tuesday, May 31, 2022.

 

Baccalaureate Address to the Class of 2020

Tuesday, May 31, 2022

Laurie L. Patton, President

A Brief History of Snow

A brief history of snow,

as told by eyewitnesses

mimicked by a chorus

collected from passers-by:

give me a chronology of the snowfall,

let me hold the thread that leads

to the borders of winter,

to a blizzard’s blue outskirts.

A brief description of what fills

the space between eastern dunes

and western lowlands,

a brief stop in winter’s long expedition.

All those who defended this city

will come out to its walls

and call after the bad weather

that fell on the shoulders of their dead:

You go first, snow, go,

once you’ve stepped forward, we’ll follow,

as you go out to the field

our singing will follow you.

After all, we’re the ones singing on a quiet night

when it’s silent downtown,

we plant the seeds of a sigh

in the black soil of breath.

Snow, fall on our childhood—

the safe haven of loyalty and noise,

here we were friendly

with the dark side of language,

with the deepening tenderness,

here we learned to collect voices

like coins,

you go first, snow, go first,

fill up the deep sadness of the well

that opened for you,

like a metaphor.

Past the last gasps of childhood behind the station wall

and the amateur blueprint of a Sunday school,

past the houses on a hill, where boys’

fragile voices break at the stem,

go ahead of us, snow, mark us present

in the book of comings and goings,

in the nighttime registry of love,

you go first, don’t be afraid of getting lost in the field

because we know you won’t get beyond the boundaries of sound,

beyond the boundaries of our names,

the world is like a dictionary, it preserves its own depths,

shares it with schoolteachers

and their students.

Your night is like prison bread, hidden in a pocket,

like the oblique silhouette of someone walking, the wax that’s shaped into the moon,

your path is a reinvented chronicle of cities,

the slope leading to the square,

the deep tracks left by hunters,

where fear meets courage.

—Serhiy Zhadan

Translated from the Ukrainian by Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk 

Welcome back, Class of 2020. A deep, beautiful, hearty, heartfelt, and heart-filled welcome back! We have not seen you in person for a while. In fact, we were not sure how many of you would want to come back to be with us. But now we know—525 of you are here! Eighty-five percent of you have made the journey back to be at your long-awaited in-person graduation. With the speakers. With loved ones, friends, and family. With all the trimmings. We are so glad you made it!

Your memories of the last time you were here must be powerful. I know they are for us. It was snowing off and on the week of March 10, 2020. You must remember. We certainly do. It felt like Midd shut down one day. The rest of higher ed did the next day. And the world did the day after that. We left each other with shock and disappointment and tears. When we left each other then, we were only beginning to learn what the virus had in store for all of us. We were in lockdown during that whole spring. And all of us kept hoping against hope that the stay-in-place orders would be lifted. Remember when we thought it would only last a few weeks? Remember when you left your belongings here, because we thought you could come back and get them when you returned for the rest of that semester? How hard it was—every minute—not to know. And then how hard it was when we did know that you, the Class of 2020, could not come back for the rest of your semester. You could not have those precious rituals of ending.

That spring, you faced other things too—beyond the disappointment of a truncated college career. Harder things. You knew that exposure could mean the loss of a loved one or a neighbor. You knew that isolation was necessary because it was a matter of life and death. And then you faced something even more extraordinary. You had to begin your postcollege life during a pandemic. Look for a job. Find a place to live. Start work online. Take care of the newly vulnerable in your immediate world. Get used to the confinement, the endless four walls of quarantine.

Given all this, on this occasion of your graduation, what can we possibly say to you? We cannot send you off into the world because you already went into it—a far different one than your peers went into just a year before you. We cannot tell you what work is going to be like because you know it already. You have already been working in some of the most difficult conditions in a century. We cannot tell you what the world is going to be like, and the challenges that you are going to face, because you already know many of them. You have already encountered them, and, knowing you, you have probably already surmounted them.

Considering these extraordinary circumstances, what can we say to you? And do for you? I believe we can do two things: First, we can welcome you home, to your first, most unusual Reunion. And second, at the very same time we can give you a proper celebration which creates closure, a sense of an ending to your Middlebury careers.

So, this is a welcoming back to the green and verdant nest of Middlebury as much as it is a send-off from it. It is a graduation that is also a homecoming. You are here to mark the finish of an education that was rudely interrupted. You are coming back home with all your wisdom and experience, to say hello and goodbye at the same time. 

In the Baccalaureate service of the class that just graduated, Class of 2022, we included the usual wisdom readings. Those are the ones you encountered in your first Convocation as first-year students, in the dark ages of 2016. We hope you kept those books and return to them when you can.  But we did not do that for you. Because our guess is that by now you already have some of that wisdom. And you have come by it the hard way.

The words of wisdom we did want to include were words about home. Not just a nostalgic sense of home, but a realistic one. A sense of how hard it is to build a home—any home. How much care and attention it takes to maintain. And how fragile it is, and how easy it is to lose. So, for this most unusual of ceremonies, and in keeping with that sense of fragility, we chose the wisdom of a gritty, creative Ukrainian poet, Serhiy Zhadan. Keep the test of the poem in front of you now as we read through pieces of it again for its own wisdom. For the last several years Zhadan has been writing about the people and cities of Ukraine, and most recently about the citizens who have violently lost their homes in a matter of days. Through no volition of their own. 

As Zhadan’s translators, Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk, tell us,

Serhiy Zhadan is arguably the best-known contemporary Ukrainian-language poet and novelist. He is also the charismatic front man and lyricist for the ska-punk band, Zhadan and the Dogs. Over the past months, as bombs have hit houses in Zhadan’s home city of Kharkiv, the writer has helped to coordinate volunteer opposition and relief efforts.

Zhadan’s poetry and fiction is filled with gritty descriptions of an economically depressed, crime-filled post-Soviet industrial east. This territory inspires Zhadan: far from being a Soviet wasteland, it is a place of deep, complicated friendships, of creative potential. Since the outbreak of war in 2014, his poetry and fiction has turned to the more pressing questions of finding a purpose in a fragmented, war-torn reality.

As the world watches the violence in Ukraine, the horror of war clarifies art’s potential to create meaning, or, in his words, “to fill this world with meaning,/ to fill it/with colors.”

And what we share with each other, and with Serhiy Zhadan, is the memory and the wisdom of snow. My guess is that in your memories of Middlebury you will have memories of snow—beginning with that snow-flurried week when you last left us.

Snow has a lot to teach us. I think, first, snow teaches about innocence and discovery. Zhadan writes,

Snow, fall on our childhood—

the safe haven of loyalty and noise,

here we were friendly

with the dark side of language,

with the deepening tenderness,

here we learned to collect voices

like coins…

For you, too, in your home at Middlebury, snow was about innocence and discovery. We all welcome snow. Some for the first time, and some for the 100th, we all still greet it in wonder and excitement, together. It means play, racing, wandering, freshness. For you, Middlebury could also be a haven of loyalty and noise. Where you learned deepening tenderness and collected voices like coins. Voices of the classroom. Voices that jumped off the page to teach new realities—wisdom you carried into your new, difficult life, wisdom you had to take with you that snowy flurrying March week, where you were pushed into an adulthood no one anticipated. 

But even when it evokes our wonder at the world, snow also teaches us clarity. It shows the outlines of things in new ways. “I’ve never seen the trees like this!” a Midd student once said to me. “And you can see all the birds in light and shadow.” Zhadan writes that snow reveals things, and shows us

Past the last gasps of childhood behind the station wall

and the amateur blueprint of a Sunday school,

past the houses on a hill, where boys’

fragile voices break at the stem…

We remember your Middlebury voices, and our guess is that you remember one another’s—clear in their outlines, and yet also fragile in their newness. If we did our jobs, then Middlebury helped you formulate, helped you define, helped you illuminate—to yourselves and to each other. You found and outlined your own ideas and values. Just as snow reveals the outlines of trees.

And not all those ideas were comfortable or familiar. That is a third thing that snow teaches us: the courage to walk into the unknown. Zhadan writes, 

You go first, snow, go,

once you’ve stepped forward, we’ll follow,

as you go out to the field

our singing will follow you.

Your postgraduation world was tougher and less familiar than anything you expected. And yet you stepped forward. Many of you worked on political campaigns in the election. Some kept up your long-distance tutoring of children still learning online and walked into the wilderness of a second year of remote education. Some started working for the environment in far-away places—places that did not have snow, but where people were far more affected by the pandemic than others. Some of you started rigorous graduate training where your mentors were just outlines on a screen. Some of you started writing. Some of you have seen jobs come and go as the vagaries of the job market continue to shift. You have moved. You have settled down, only to pick up again as you find your work and your people.

You have had to defend things. You have had to fight for things. Like democracy. Like equality. Like the right to live peacefully. Like health care. You might have been afraid, but you defended them anyway. Zhadan puts it beautifully: 

&…your path is a reinvented chronicle of cities,

the slope leading to the square,

the deep tracks left by hunters,

where fear meets courage.

As you went out your fear met your courage and allowed you to proceed. 

And then there is a final lesson from snow. Snow is a way of blessing the comings and goings of all beings—including you. Remember the student who could see the birds in the trees when it snowed at Middlebury? She went on to say, “You can also see all the tracks of the animals around—who they are, where they go, when they travel.” The paths of living things around us are indeed visible in completely new ways. When it snows, as Zhadan puts it, “the world is like a dictionary. It preserves its own depths.” Snow gives us a record of life around us, of all the comings and goings of creatures.

In your travel through Middlebury snows, you saw and made many tracks. Your own footprints. The footprints of others. We have followed your tracks since you left us. They lead us all into new worlds. Zhadan writes about snow’s luminous record keeping with this verse:

…go ahead of us, snow, mark us present

in the book of comings and goings…

Mark us present in the book of comings and goings. On this most unusual day, this once-a-century day of hello and goodbye, we mark you present in the book of comings and goings. May you keep the life of courage and commitment that you have already begun. In our memories of snow, and all that it teaches us, Middlebury embraces and blesses you as you continue on your way. As you step forward, our singing will follow.

Congratulations.