Of Hills and Dales – 2015 Commencement Address [Hillsdale College]

The following is adapted from a speech delivered on May 9, 2015, at Hillsdale College’s 163rd Commencement ceremony.

I don't always read the Imprimis when it comes in the mail right away.....but when I do, there's always a gem awaiting. This is one of them.

**...What do I mean by “quality of mind”? To help answer that, I turn to the writer whom I’ve made a special study of, C.S. Lewis, who in his article “Willing Slaves of the Welfare State” writes this:

I believe a man is happier, and happy in a richer way, if he has “the freeborn mind.” But I doubt whether he can have this without economic independence, which the new society is abolishing. For economic independence allows an education not controlled by Government; and in adult life it is the man who needs, and asks, nothing of Government who can criticise its acts and snap his fingers at its ideology. Read Montaigne; that’s the voice of a man with his legs under his own table, eating the mutton and turnips raised on his own land.**

**....I think we must allow for a certain hyperbole in what Lewis says when he talks of the man in adult life who needs and asks nothing of government. I doubt such a person really exists. All of us need something from government: working sewerage, roads to drive on, armies to defend us. But if we understand Lewis to be talking about education, pure and simple, as I believe he is, then we can see the truth and the importance of what he says.

.....and....

But one of the things I admire about Churchill is that he didn’t just let these things happen to him. His life may have been a rollercoaster, but he was more than a mere passenger. He knew that the wise man learns from his reverses; he doesn’t simply defy them, but turns them to effect. Churchill responded to the low points in his life with the muscle of his will, yes, but also with the artistry of his soul.

I think we see a nice illustration of this in his passionate interest in painting. If you haven’t read Churchill’s Painting as a Pastime, do! It’s one of the best things he wrote. He took up painting during the First World War and I have the sense that painting for him was more than a diverting hobby, more than a release valve from the pressures of high office: it was also a way in which he could respond creatively to difficulty, transmuting it into something noble and beautiful....**

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