By Kathryn Walker '64

Ladies and gentlemen, President Ryerson, distinguished faculty, graduates. Good morning. And congratulations. Thank you very much for inviting me back here on this rare Aurora morning. When President Ryerson called me and told me that the Class of 1997 was issuing this invitation, she said that they, you, that is, were interested in hearing about a film project of mine called The Millennium Project. She told me as well that this is the year that my friend Alan Clugston will be retiring from the Wells faculty. So these two circumstances, Alan Clugston and the Millennium, made a rather sentimental coincidence for me since I believe it was just about a thousand years ago that Alan and I first met here at Wells College when I was an undergraduate and he was the dashing new addition to our very brilliant English faculty.

I. Remembering G. Alan Clugston

I knew that my good friend Reynolds Price had known Alan when they were both instructors at Duke and asked Reynolds what he remembered about Alan then. Here's what he said and I quote: "We both came to Duke in the fall of 1958 as very wet-behind-the-ears young instructors. I didn't know Alan extremely well, but we went to a lot of great late-fifties, cheap wine parties and a lot of horrendous lectures by our older, stuffier colleagues; and I remember him with great affection. Even that early, he was clearly set for life as a superb teacher. What was most notable of all was his sly-fox but entirely benign smile. He plainly knew something he wasn't entirely ready to tell - which is to say, he had inexhaustible resources of imagination, wit and attention and a passionate love for poetry. I can see him grinning at this very moment, though we haven't met in 40 years. Give him my warmest greetings and a hug." 

So, you see, although we are here at this moment of retirement, the more things change, the more they remain the same. In the very best way, Alan brought a kind of expansive willingness to be part of our undergraduate life and treat us as friends. He performed in plays with us, he entertained us, and it was lovely for us. He was even willing to appear in tights for productions of Shakespeare. And one has to admit he looked rather well in them. He and his fabulous Aunt Kate introduced a jolly sophistication into village life as we knew it, as if we were all suddenly inhabiting a charming, if slightly wacky, English novel. 

Alan's aunt Kate Clugston was a remarkable woman. Kate had been a playwright in New York during a great era of the theater, she had written a play for Katherine Hepburn, and had led a trail-blazing and exemplary life as an independent woman, and was still, when I knew her, a charming and inspiring figure. I remember her saying to me once at a party at the president's house when Sissy Farenthold was here that the worst thing about getting old is that nobody gets your jokes. I was your age when she said that to me and, having lived in dormitories for four years, I knew the value of jokes. I was greatly struck by such a vivid evocation of the passage of time. Since then I have lived through several major eras myself. I know that between you and me as I stand here there is a gap of experience that in some ways can never be bridged. I had the extraordinary experience of being young in the sixties when it seemed the whole world might transform itself into something unimaginable, for better or for worse, depending on how you felt about politics and music. I had the thrill of riding the first idealistic wave of feminism when it came rolling through in the seventies. For me these experiences will always stand for the revelations and the exhilarating idealism of being young. But I only have to look at MTV or at television shows and advertising aimed at your generation to understand that the vocabulary of hipness, if that's not too old-fashioned a word, has passed me by. I think I began to think of my film, The Millennium Project, because I was experiencing this insight on a rather grand scale. That is, how much might times change and can what seems central or even absolute slip away? I began to wonder just how much of what has long been regarded as well-established and durable in defining our idea of who we are as a culture might actually be vulnerable as we approach the year 2000. 

II. The Millennium Project

Because of the frightening visions foretelling cosmic catastrophe in the Book of Revelation, at the year 1000, Christians stopped building churches and waited for the end to come. It was only after the date had passed that beautiful Romanesque churches began to appear all over Europe. There are also Mayan prophecies, Hopi Indian prophecies, and, of course, the venerable Nostrodamus believes this is a culminating hour. The Hopi believe that we now inhabit two worlds simultaneously, what they call the fourth and fifth world and that half the people alive today are the new people of the fifth world who can realize the future, and the rest are surviving relics of a world already dead. 

But more important to me than the interesting apocalyptic aspects of the subject was the question of how people were imagining the future we might actually survive into, the future that would be called the 21st century. I wanted to create a vast conversation about what it's like to live at the end of this amazing century in a time of intense transition that no one really understands. And I wanted the conversation to go on for the ten years of this last decade of the 20th century. And so began The Millennium Project. The first person I interviewed on film was Hamilton Fish, the then publisher of the magazine The Nation. His first remark was that his grandfather, also a Hamilton Fish, one who had just died at the venerable age of 102, had known a man who knew Lafayette. Here, I think you will agree, are generation gaps on a grand scale. 

I think it was the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead who made the interesting observation sometime much earlier in this century that something radical had begun to happen to the human experience. He observed that for his grandparents, who would presumably have lived sometime in the 18th century, life never changed out of recognition. That is to say, except for minor adjustments, the world would have looked the same and time would have felt the same throughout their lives, and they would have had the impression that it had always been so and always would be so. Then at a certain point in Whitehead's parents' experience, because the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution were being felt, life might have changed out of recognition once in their lives. Time, for example, was beginning to become money as factories changed the nature of the workforce, rural became urban, and enormous fortunes were amassed in entirely new ways. Whitehead, who lived from 1861 to 1947, through the First and Second World War, felt that for himself life had changed out of recognition two or three times, I think. And for us? Would you say every decade? You see the implication. 

Obviously when we look at silent films the world the characters inhabit is so alien to us it might as well be another planet. Even looking at films from the sixties now, the world depicted, a world I lived in and ought to remember, looks very remote. It seems luxuriantly empty and undestroyed, the automobiles are strangely huge, the Technicolor strangely bright, it's unrecognizable compared to the way we live now. The pace that began to pick up in the 19th century is now moving at breakneck speed and bursting through the boundaries of time itself into cyberspace. Cyberspace is a place that most of us now inhabit some of the time although none of us can really say where it is. The texture, the actual landscape of reality has been altered. We can now have virtual experiences and virtual relationships.

There is a wonderful poem by the English poet Philip Larkin called "Days." The idea in this poem seems old-fashioned now although not in the way Larkin intended. I'll read it to you: 

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us 
Time and time over. 
They are to be happy in: 
Where can we live but days? 

Ah, solving that question 
Brings the priest and the doctor 
In their long coats 
Running over the fields. 

Larkin was already being ironic since in his time people were not wearing "long coats" nor were they "running over the fields," at least not in London. "Running over the fields" conjures images of Chekhov and Tolstoy, Thomas Hardy and George Eliot, and the great metaphysical and existential questions posed by those authors. This poem was written in 1953. It's not quite 50 years later and we can now ask in what other ways this poem has become ironic. Do priests and doctors still pose the important questions of life? Or are those questions now posed by media executives? Do we live in days? Or do we inhabit the virtual reality of television and computers? Have we slipped the moorings of seasons and cycles? What about the hyper-manipulated reality of advertising and entertainment? In other words, is the essence of our experience as humans being essentially changed? 

It does seem that the enormous appetite and influence of business and the media have altered the intrinsic nature of our interactions. It's hard now to have an experience that hasn't been processed by something: an advertising jingle, a pop song, a television show, a magazine cover article. So much of our lives seems demographically analyzed, commodified and market driven. Although one jaded media analyst I spoke to summed up the other side of the phenomenon I'm attempting to describe by saying, "Five hundred channels of what?" There's plenty of "It'." Is anyone really interested? 

In the Millennium Project I have spoken so far to over 100 people and my question to them has been: "Where do we go from here? How do you imagine a future evolving out of the enormous changes we inhabit now?" The responses, as you can imagine, are wide-ranging in every way from despair through cautious optimism to a real longing for transformation. The testimony of experts is unsettling: the disassurances of chaos theory suggesting that, after all, knowledge may not be power in a random world (a Santa Fe Institute Biologist describes the chaos paradigm of sand piles, that it's impossible to know if the next grains of sand dropped on it will create a small or large avalanche; think of toxic waste reaching critical mass; or think of human consciousness evolving itself); the astonishing new information in climatology that indicates that ice ages may be virtually overnight phenomena (a climatology professor who used to tell his students they might see an ice age in their lifetime now tells them they might see an ice age before they get their degree); the unknown implications for social consciousness and consciousness itself of living in cyberspace (are we becoming something we have not been before?); the global insecurities of post-cold war national breakdowns and the implications that international corporate power have for national sovereignty (will we be living in a world of mass migrations and dissolving borders?). 

The first year of interviews alone addresses the collapse of the Soviet Union, the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, the Persian Gulf War, the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings. Very large questions are raised. Very few answers are ventured. 

A gay man in New York comments that for him the millennial event has already occurred since most of the people with whom he expected to spend his life are dead from A.I.D.S. A Saturday Night Live writer suggests that since the collapse of the Soviet Union, in a few years time we'll be able to go into Army-Navy stores and buy H-bombs. Noam Chomsky speculates that computer communication is depoliticizing society and turning us into Martians. And Wilma Mankiller, an astonishing woman who was when I spoke with her the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, remarks that in her tradition it is believed that we are entering an era in which female energy will emerge to save the world. I certainly hope so, don't you? 

As you can see, the questions the meaning of the year 2000 arouses are complex and profound. We live in a extraordinary and challenging time. The Chinese, as you may know, when they said "May you live in interesting times," meant it as a curse. 

III. Content and connection

As much as you and I may not have the same generational references, we do have a great deal in common and we have it in common with many generations before us. We've had the incredible luxury of living in a remote and quiet place for four years in a community of scholars and artists at a time in our lives when we are entirely free to concentrate on discovering what compels our interest and what we love in order to try to become the most fulfilled and useful person we are able to be. In other words we have enjoyed a liberal arts education. And you and I have also enjoyed that privilege as women in an institution in which there is passionate support for our right to have that. We've enjoyed the inspiration and friendship of wonderful teachers like Alan Clugston and like Evelyn Clinton, who is here today, and who ran the tough and brilliant drama program when I was here and gave me the confidence and support to go into the professional theater. Whatever else may happen, let's hope that what's happening here this morning, the culmination and celebration of this experience, will be happening in some version we can recognize 100 years from now. So much of what endures here, the unspoiled beauty of nature, the human proportion of village life, the quiet and the detachment from the frenzy of popular culture are venerable customs in the happiness of human communities. Sadly they are becoming rather fabulous luxuries in the late 20th century. 

The great requirement for the new millennium seems to me to be that we don't lose track of what we need most as human beings and as communities. Contrary to what our culture seems to enforce, we don't need distraction and excitement as much as we need content and connection; we don't need a bigger and broader market with bigger and better attractions unless we also have time and space and a quiet place to do nothing at all but experience ourselves and each other. We need to recreate a human sphere in this truly mad rush to the future. We need to preserve the psychic and physical environments that make us human. 

At the end of every interview I did for the Millennium Project, I asked each person the question: "If the year 2000 were a door, what color would you paint it?" The point of the question, of course, was to drop the conversation down to an instinctive level where people would have to respond spontaneously from their feelings. Lots of people said red: "It's a crisis," "It's vibrant, " "Watch out," and "It's important, that's all we can know about the future." White, black, and green were suggested for reasons you can imagine, and even "Yale blue" for reasons which perhaps you cannot. But one of the most moving answers to this question came from Andre Gregory, the theater director. Andre was interviewed in the early nineties at a time when people were less optimistic or perhaps less indifferent than now. Andre is European. He had been comparing what he considered the "sleepiness" in America in the eighties to the unconsciousness in Germany in the thirties when he grew up. He was not optimistic and yet, when I asked him the question about the door, what color he would paint it, he answered "Golden." "Golden?" I said, somewhat incredulous. "Yes," he said. "You and I both grew up feeling we could change the future, that we could change the world, change politics, change the theater, make ourselves felt. I don't believe my children feel that way. I have to believe that the future is golden for them. That somehow they will be entering a garden. I have to believe that." 

All of us, I believe, would most like to think that the door to the future is golden. What I would also like to believe is that you, the graduates of 1997, do believe in your power to impact the world and change it for the better. I want you to believe that the very good education and experience that you've had here at this school has given you the courage and clarity to understand and to effect the outcome of your own lives and therefore the lives of all of us. I want you to believe that the future belongs to you and that you are free to accept or, more importantly, reject what is offered to you as the authorized version of collective life. That you will trust your instincts as women and as human beings to provide for yourselves and the people you love what is genuinely necessary for survival. 

Once an English major, always an English major, I'm afraid. Therefore, I'm going to read you one more poem to make my point. It's a poem by the contemporary poet Mary Oliver called "The Summer Day." 

Who made the world? 
Who made the swan, and the black bear? 
Who made the grasshopper? 
This grasshopper, I mean - 
the one who has flung herself out of the grass, 
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, 
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down - 
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts 
her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. 
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. 
I don't know exactly what a prayer is. 
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down 
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, 
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, 
which is what I have been doing all day. 
Tell me, what else should I have done? 
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? 
Tell me, what is it you plan to do 
with your one wild and precious life?

You graduates are genuinely turn-of-the-century figures. Some of your lives will have been spent in the 20th century and more than half will take place in the 21st. You are the true agents of this transition. I hope you treasure the values you found here and that you will be active members of a great new populist consensus that will make itself heard in determining what will be preserved in the human project as it enters a new and daunting era. I know you're well prepared. Make Wilma Mankiller's prediction come true. Let the greatly culturally undervalued female instincts for preservation and protection guide the future of this planet. Use your strong hearts and good minds. I wish you all the best. Enjoy your wild and precious life.

Delivered Saturday, May 24, 1997, Wells College, Aurora, New York