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CHAPEL TALK
Remarks delivered by Gregory J. Schneider, Ronald M. Druker ’62 Head of School on January 11, 2021
Good morning, boys, and welcome back to Belmont Hill after what I hope has been a restful, if not unique, kind of winter break. 2021 has officially begun, and I think we all hope that it will be a better one for our world than 2020 seemed to be. We must acknowledge that much uncertainty still exists about the remainder of this academic year. On the one hand, we are encouraged by optimism surrounding vaccines and the sense of hope for the future. On the other hand lies the grim reality of the pandemic today and its immediate challenges. I know that I return to campus with a great sense of optimism and hope about the second half of our year together. But we are going to need all of you boys – especially our Form VI boys – to lead us to a brighter future. It is time to start working together once again. When I first sat down to write this speech, I was only going to address optimism and excitement about the day when normal returns. To be honest, I wasn’t having that much fun writing it, and I worried you wouldn’t have much fun listening either. It felt premature. I suspect that optimistic clichés are wearing thin for many of you at this point; I know they are for me. Yet I did want to offer a sense of balance and perspective as we launch these next few months as a school – clearly our most immediate challenge. I found myself landing on the idea of disillusionment, teaching, and Bob Dylan. Let’s see how it goes.
Over the holidays, I was playing a board game with my family, and my oldest daughter offered the word “disillusionment” as a clue. Somehow the word stuck with me in connection to the sense of cloudy gloom and disappointment that the pandemic has brought to us this year. However, this is not the first time that a generation of young people has felt disillusioned. I was raised on the music of the ’70s even though I was a child of the ’80s and a young adult in the ’90s. To this day, bands like the Allman Brothers, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, and the Rolling Stones dominate my playlists. I had some awareness of Bob Dylan in high school as I was forced to do a rendition of “Blowin’ in the Wind” in my a capella group, and I remember an English teacher or two who referenced him as a poet. And yet Dylan’s presence didn’t speak to me in high school – he was somehow a bit too folksy and his guitar riffs were not nearly dramatic enough for my taste at the time.
When I landed at Amherst College in 1992, some of my friends were far more enamored of Dylan than I. Within a year or two, the song “Hurricane” became the anthem of my entire college friend group and remains so to this day. It was always played at our late-night gatherings with its raucous violin riffs adorning the epic tale of Ruben “Hurricane” Carter’s horrific victimization by our justice system. This story was perhaps made known more clearly to all of you in Denzel Washington’s feature film Hurricane in 1999 – but of course, you weren’t born yet. Well, check it out if you are interested. Ruben Carter’s story alone has the makings of a great Chapel Talk, and I hope this mention might spur some of you to explore it further.
In October of 1994, Bob Dylan and his band visited LeFrak Gymnasium at Amherst College for a concert, which struck me as the calling card of a star whose best years were behind him. However, as someone who was also continuing to play in bands of various kinds, I began to appreciate just how many songs that I loved were, unbeknownst to me, written by Dylan: “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” “Masters of War,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” “All Along the Watchtower,” and “It Ain’t Me, Babe.” With the passage of time, these songs spoke to me more clearly through other artists.
Earlier in my career, I was particularly impressed by a certain teacher with whom I worked named Mr. Fletcher, who employed a student-centered posture, an interdisciplinary mind, and an ability to re-invent himself in so many remarkable ways over his career. A history teacher by trade, one was equally likely in a Fletcher class to see a piece of the Constitution, a video of the Beatles, or the image of American Gothic on his projector screen. But above all else, like all great teachers, he knew how to tell a story that could capture an adolescent mind.
I would often find myself drifting to his classroom when I needed to be pulled away from the demands of leading a school. I would step in whenever I heard the music – he was an expert on the historical significance of the Beatles,
for example. But above all else, you could count on what seemed like a weekly appearance of Bob Dylan in Mr. Fletcher’s classroom. Students were asked to interpret lyrics, critique performances, and understand his historical significance in the context of world events. One of the songs that was always discussed in his classes was “My Back Pages” from 1964.
Now, I am no Dylan scholar like Mr. Fletcher, and I will not try to pose as one just for the purpose of this talk. It is interesting to note, however, that this song was released when Dylan was only 23 after he was emerging as a voice for the Civil Rights movement at such a young age in the early ’60s. While the lyrics of this particular song are much debated, most agree that its haunting refrain: “Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now” seems to capture his growing sense of disillusionment with the role that had been thrust upon him. Its change from his prior messaging frustrated many of his fans, and he did not actually perform it live until a concert in the summer of 1988 in Mountain View, California. For me, the song is, among other things, an iconic expression of ambiguity, of ambivalence, and of complexity – words that strike me as relevant at a time when we are processing the realities of a pandemic, systemic racism, and a divided political landscape concurrently. It is frankly too much to sit with each and every day, and it is hard to see a clear path out of this abyss at times.
There is real temptation for all of us, or at least it’s tempting for Heads of School, to try to package this current period of time as somehow logical, expected, or able to be navigated with just a bit more patience and wisdom. To do so, I am reminded, would be to become one of Dylan’s hypocrites from the lyrics of “My Back Pages,” which he first labels as “corpse-evangelists” and later as “self-ordained professors.” Somehow, even at 23, Dylan achieved a kind of self-awareness regarding his own penchant to oversimplify the realities of the ’60s in lines like:
Half-wracked prejudice leaped forth “Rip down all hate,” I screamed Lies that life is black and white Spoke from my skull.
He acknowledges his own capacity for prejudice as well as being complicit in an overly simplistic narrative.
In analyzing this song, one is left with some painful questions like: “Bob, don’t you believe in this stuff anymore?” or “Mr. Dylan, don’t you think there is still a difference between right and wrong?” or “Isn’t the answer still blowin’ in the wind somewhere?” I suspect we will look back upon our period of history with a different kind of perspective than we can now. Whatever it is that we believe to be true about how we should have solved our current plight, we should not lose sight of the ambiguity and complexity of this era. You are already being asked to sit with this complexity each and every day during this pandemic.
Coming back to my own analysis of Dylan, my favorite part of the song may actually be its title, which is almost never the case for me as a writer or a singer. This concept of “My Back Pages” somehow speaks to me of the notion of legacy, or that piece that is written about the author at the end of the book. In Belmont Hill jargon, we have a back page on our newspaper, The Panel – perhaps the part of the paper that actually matters most to all of you when the issue arrives. This song asks the question, What will “The Back Pages” of our life actually be? How will we write them honestly when our time comes? We are often so focused on the lead narrative and the strength of our current convictions. “The Back Pages” of our lives will likely be fraught with the more challenging realities of nostalgia, wistfulness, and perhaps even regret.
I asked Mr. Butler to project the lyrics of this song while I perform it for you today. While we all may not be feeling quite as “Freewheelin’” as Dylan did when he released this song and this album, I still love the song. Sadly, no song will solve the realities of this year or the ongoing challenges of this pandemic for all of you, but perhaps a little Dylan will allow you to sit with the ambiguity for just a little while longer – knowing that others have felt this way before us – and that brighter days will, in fact, arrive.
