4 KEITH FROME President I’ve been asked to write a few words about Park’s motto, Veritas et Gaudium, truth and joy. A few words? How can anyone say just a few words, or even a few thousand words, about two pursuits which, arguably, have dominated the entirety of recorded (and unrecorded) human discourse, thought, and behavior? The nature of truth and the experience of joy pretty much encompass the fundamental questions all children and adolescents are naturally compelled to ask: What is the case? What is really going on? Why? Who is fooling me and whom can I trust? What is happening when I lose myself in play? How can I transform toil into joy? As we grow older, the idea of duty begins to predominate, and some of us put aside the seemingly inconsequential pursuit of truth and the perhaps childish delight in joy. But the residue of those nagging questions about truth and joy lingers within each of us, however buried by the cares of career and family. Park’s motto, though, sealed in perpetuity on the exterior of Hamlin Hall and on our publications and diplomas, is meant to remind (and to haunt) its graduates, like a long finger tapping on their shoulders, to continue to understand that the pursuit of truth is a joyful enterprise that can transform the calls of duty and responsibility into a life well-lived. A few words? I’ll start with truth and offer Plato’s allegory of the cave as an idea of truth that has dominated Western thinking for thousands of years. In The Republic, Socrates argues that most people grow up like prisoners chained to their seats facing the back wall of a cave unable to turn or move. At the front of the cave, a fire burns and objects pass before it projecting shadows on the back wall. For their entire lives, the prisoners take the shadows for reality and never realize that they are just illusions. One prisoner, though, escapes and discovers the true source of these images. The liberated prisoner returns to let the other prisoners know that they are experiencing mere representations, but they cannot comprehend the discovery, for shadows are all they know. This allegory has been much debated as to whether it is a story about appearance versus reality; the nature of art; the effects of political indoctrination; the consequences of poor education; or about the meaning of truth itself. I’ll make two points. First, the story is, of course, not real. It is a shadow itself and its simplicity belies difficult questions about how we come to know something to be true. But Socrates does capture that a lot of people think truth is objective; that truth is something really real somewhere “out there” independent of our minds. In order to apprehend it, we think we have to pierce the veil of appearance that continually fools and bewitches us. Second, if we take the story on its own terms, notice that the person who finds truth is the active learner as opposed to the passive prisoners who live in the cave. The hero of the allegory unchains, moves, darts, escapes, explores, risks, investigates, experiments, discovers, returns, and teaches. This is the kind of experiential truth-seeking and truthseeker I think Park’s founders meant to express when they chose veritas to anchor the school’s motto. On to joy. Many of the world’s faith traditions teach that joy is paradoxical, for you can never experience it. The idea is that joy, as distinguished from pleasure, involves breaking beyond the boundaries of the self and transcending one’s ego. By definition, in the moment of joy, there is no longer a distinctive “you” to – well – enjoy it. You let slip the shackles of your attachment to your “I” in order to experience the ecstasy of unity and oneness. The great saxophonist and jazz composer John Coltrane may have had this in mind in his composition “Joy,” but he goes beyond joy as an isolated experience, locating it in a comprehensive philosophy of living. In his “First Meditations for Quartet,” Coltrane situates joy as one among five movements: Love; Compassion; Joy; Consequences; Serenity. The idea, I think, is that joy is part of a life lived deliberately in service to others. If we lead with love and engage others with compassion, we unchain ourselves from the narrow confines of self-regard and experience joy which brings about salutary consequences resulting in serenity. Coltrane’s swirl of notes and sounds and melodies and tempos help us understand that truth and joy are never that simple and linear. Perhaps truth and joy, to be authentically understood, need to be heard or hearkened rather than spoken or written. But if school mottos are meant to act like life rudders, steering us toward what is fundamentally important, then the two words in Park’s motto, Veritas et Gaudium, are at least an invitation to continually reflect on how and why we do our work and lead our lives and how that experience deepens or disengages our connection to the world and to others.
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