Public Addresses 83
graduate from this institution is ready for the scientific and
technological problems which confront us in the new age of
automation and missiles and space travel. But I have an un-
easy feeling that you are really no more ready than your
elders for the risks and ambiguities of an age of wonder and
terror. And your unreadiness is due, at least in part, to the
fact that you do not know and cannot know what the future
holds for you. Nowadays even the best education begins to
be obsolescent at the moment when you start settling that
mortarboard on your head. How, then, are we to live and
work in this twilight between the dusk and the dawn in this
“time being”?
I have a few sage comments to offer in this connection.
But they amount to more of a “Bon Voyage” or “Happy
Blast-Off” than they pretend to be a Baedeker for tomor-
row’s world. I feel toward the graduating classes this year
Iilce some of the old sea-captains at Cadiz must have felt
toward Christopher and his crews: “Go with God, and may
His blessings go with you; for, by the Holy Faith, you’re
going to need them!”
Most of you doubtless know the verse-play of W. H.
Auden’s that he calls A Christmas Oratorio. You remember
how tire action of the play keeps shuttling back and forth
between the first Christmas and our own crises—between the
first and twentieth centuries. In the closing comments of tire
narrator we get an insight that seems to me more poignant
and valid now than when I first saw and heard the play.
Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree,
Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes—
Some have got broken—and carrying them up to the attic.
The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt.
And the children got ready for school. There are enough
Left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week—
Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,