Spring. And for this young man sitting in a ninth grade English class, my fancy was heading off in many directions other than the pursuit of academic truth. The last class of the afternoon would soon be over, and we would all tear out of those halls of learning for whatever sport the day would bring. “Dudley,” Mrs. Hart called, “would you read ‘Thanatopsis’ for the class.” Shifting gears to the reality at hand, I stood at my desk and slowly began reading those dreadful words by William Cullen Bryant about dying. The poem seemed a mile long, but I made it through and took my seat once again.
“That was very mediocre,” exclaimed the teacher.
“Thank you,” I said in all innocence, for I had no earthly idea what she meant by that impressive word. She always used big words. There were giggles and snickers which were soon drowned by the bell and the shuffle of feet. Outside the door, several friends informed me of the true meaning of the word. And I have been fleeing it ever since so that, in the words of “Thanatopsis”, “ ..when thy summons comes to join / The innumerable caravan, that moves / To that mysterious realm, where each shall take / His chamber in the silent halls of death, / Thou go not like a quarry-slave at night.”
In a recent column, the reemerging Garrison Keiller recalls a similar time: “When I was 16, Helen Fleischman assigned me to memorize Shakespeare’s Sonnet No. 29, ‘When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state,’ for English class, and fifty years later, that poem is still in my head. Algebra got washed away, and geometry and most of biology, but those lines about the redemptive power of love in the face of shame are still here behind my eyeballs, more permanent than my own teeth.”
At the heart of each of us is the desire to have significance. To be worth something. To be remembered. To make our mark on the world. And the way we go about it is in that mythical search for success through the pursuit of excellence. Maybe one of the reasons we pursue excellence is because we feel the hot pursuit of mediocrity at our heels. Thus, the chase for success is not just a running toward some kind of worth or significance; it is also a running away from the fear that we might be caught dead without having done a blooming thing right in our lives.