The Valediction
A life is only the longest sentence of them all
When one has taught in the same lecture hall for thirty-seven years, one develops a private about its acoustics.
I have always believed that this room keeps something of every voice that has ever spoken in it, and that the air in here is thick with unfinished sentences.
If that is so, then I am about to add my last, and I shall try to make it a sentence the room might think worth its remembering.
I was asked to speak today on the subject of my life's work, and I found, on sitting down to prepare, that I could not quite remember what it was.
I have written on register and on rhetoric, on the sermon and the science paper, on the grammar of hedging and the ethics of the plain style.
But these are the subjects of my books, and a life's work, I have only lately understood, is not the same thing as the subjects of one's books.
My real subject, it turns out, was a single stubborn , which I dressed in forty years of scholarship because I lacked the courage to state it plainly.
So let me state it plainly now, in this room's last hearing of my voice.
I believe that how we speak is a moral matter, and that there is no such thing as a merely technical choice of words.
I believe that clarity is a form of courage, and that most is simply fear wearing the borrowed robes of .
I believe that to choose a word is to choose a way of being answerable, and that a civilisation may be measured by how much of the truth its language is willing to carry.
These convictions are not discoveries; they are far older than I am, and I have merely spent a career finding new evidence for what wiser people always knew.
That, I have come to think, is what most scholarship actually is: the slow and honourable rediscovery of the obvious, in language precise enough to make it feel new.
I have been, in the strict sense, a specialist, and I want to say one word in defence of before I finally lay it down.
It is fashionable to mock the scholar who knows more and more about less and less, and the mockery is not entirely unfair.
But there is a kind of attention that only the specialist can pay, a patience with the small that the world, in its perpetual hurry, has very nearly forgotten how to value.
To spend a decade on the placement of a single qualifying verb is either madness or , and I have never once been able to tell the two apart, and I have long since stopped trying.
What I can tell you, with the authority of a life spent at it, is that the small, attended to long enough, quietly becomes the large.
The tremor in a single sentence, followed faithfully, leads to the character of a mind; and the character of a mind, followed further, to the health or sickness of a whole culture.
I have spent my life looking through the near end of the telescope, and, standing here at its close, I find that I regret nothing.
To the young scholars in this room, several of whom I can see pretending not to be moved, which is precisely what I would be doing in your place, I leave a single .
Guard the plain sentence. It is under threat, as it has always been, from those who profit by confusion, and you are now among its few appointed keepers.
Say the true thing simply; endure, as you must, the accusation of ; and remember that those who level it have, almost always, something of their own to hide.
To my colleagues, who have argued with me for decades and thereby taught me the better part of everything I know, I offer a gratitude too large for the register of any lecture.
We answered to one another, and that answering was the whole of the ; a discipline, in the end, is nothing but a community that has agreed to be answerable together.
And to this room, which will keep my voice as it has kept so many before mine, I return the one thing I was lent thirty-seven years ago: the attention of the young, which is the only wealth a teacher is ever truly given to hold.
I have kept faith with it as well as I was able, and where I failed, the failure is legible, as I always insisted to my students that failure honestly should be.
There is a sentence I have written, in one disguise or another, in every book I ever published, and I shall write it once more, aloud, and then be silent.
Every sentence is a decision about how much of the truth one is prepared to be answerable for, and a life, I have found at the last, is only the longest sentence of them all.
I have tried to be answerable for mine; and now, with the room's kind permission, I shall listen for a while to the voices it has kept, and take my place, at last, among them.