A smattering of compulsory applause follows Mr. Holmes up to the mic. The first thing he does is page through the sheets of paper Principal Manx left behind, holding them up just enough that the graduates behind him can see that they’re all blank—props. Because Manx has done this same ceremony so many times, he could sleepwalk through it.
Mr. Holmes straightens the papers, sets them back down, and then he turns, looks from left to right at all of the graduates before coming back around to stare down all the faces in the bleachers.
When it’s finally pin-drop silent, he leads off with, “The saying is actually ‘Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ ” To punctuate this never-asked-for correction, he clears his smoker’s throat, even has to sneak a hand up, tug at the loose skin over his Adam’s apple like trying to make room for the air he’s going to need here.
“It’s from George Santayana, a Spanish-American philosopher from the first part of the twentieth century. He also famously said that history is a pack of lies about events that never happened, told by people who weren’t there.”
He takes the podium in his hands and leans onto it, glares out into the bleachers, adds, “We, however, are all here in this moment. Yes, in the months and years to come, our stories of this momentous day will become just that—stories—but for this, for right now, for the moment we’re in, perhaps we can, as a group, understand just what it is that’s happening here.
Just a little.”
Now it’s Principal Manx’s turn to offer a corrective, in the form of a cough probably meant to remind Mr. Holmes of some conversation they had about the content of his retirement speech, here.
Mr. Holmes doesn’t seem to hear it.
“We have guests among us today,” he says, holding his hand out to the Terra Novans, giving everyone license to look to the center of the bleachers again. He holds his hands up to the side to clap, but there’s something distinctly mocking about it, so the few who fall in clapping with him trail away almost immediately.
“And I say ‘guests,’ but please, Mr. Mondragon, Mr. Baker, the rest of you—I don’t mean to suggest your stay here will be temporary, of course. We should hope it won’t be. You’re the saviors of this mountain town, this lake, this valley, this county —of all of us.” Mr. Holmes stops again to clear his throat, and when he comes back to the mic, he’s nodding with resolve.
“There is of course another filter we can understand ‘guest’
through, as many of these graduates will know, from having processed through my classroom. In Ancient Greece, the gods would come down from Mount Olympus to walk among the mortals, but they would come in the form of travelers, of beggars, and so what developed in that society, due to that belief, was an etiquette built around abject fear. Completely sensible fear. If they didn’t comport themselves properly, offer a bowl of soup, say, even their last bowl of soup, then… then Zeus could stand up from those beggar’s robes and strike them down, erase them as if they never were.”
Mr. Holmes lets that settle, then repeats it for emphasis: “As if they never were.”
“Mr. Holmes—” Principal Manx starts, coming up from his chair, but Mr. Holmes holds his hand back, not asking for another minute at the mic, but informing Manx that he’s taking that minute.
Go, sir, Jade says inside, grinning with wonder.
“But this is America, of course, not the Mediterranean,” Mr.
Holmes says. “I should be more even-handed, use iconography more associated with this soil. Apologies. Let me… here, I know. Pre-contact South America, how’s that? We can find an apt example there, I believe. Look to the Inca, say. Not the Inca as they were when the Spanish blundered into the Andes, but as that empire had been rising and falling for millennia, all on their own. And, before you ask, I don’t mean to say that this mountain we live on is the Andes, or that gods and rulers walk among us. But, these ancient Inca, whose technological sophistication rivaled and surpassed any of their contemporaries across the globe, they eventually achieved a level of social stratification that essentially deified the ruling class, the wealthiest of the wealthy, and how this played out for them is something we should perhaps pay attention to ourselves, still keeping to our Santayana, as that ruling class, the wealthy elite, they didn’t only lock all the resources up for themselves, casting the working classes into not just penury but destitution, but they so revered themselves that they would build elaborate houses for their mummified dead, and continue to serve them food, and assign servants to them, and a society this top-heavy is of course doomed to topple over and over again, until it finds a more stable, and even-handed, way to persist and thrive. Or if you resist Santayana, then perhaps you’ll listen to Mark Twain, who said that history doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme. I only hope that Proofrock won’t be part of that couplet. But, please, I don’t want any of you associating these Incan houses of the dead with the very nice homes going up across the lake, of course. We’re not the Inca, are we? Neither should we be the Ancient Greeks. When the gods knock on our doors, instead of offering them our last ladle of hard-won soup, we should perhaps, instead, offer them the point of our spe—”