Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence

When I was a fifth grader, my math/reading teacher handed out a copy of Desiderata, explaining that this was a famous piece of writing found in an abandoned church in Texas and thought to be written by a monk whose identity was never determined. We read this handout and I remember writing it out in my notebook in red pen. I felt like it was expounding something I might want to access later, in case things got messy.

It turns out that the myth of Desiderata is that it was found in Baltimore – Olde St Paul’s Church – in the 1690s. I may have conflated Texas with Baltimore (it happens) or perhaps my math/reading teacher was wrong. Either way, this myth about anonymous monks and fortuitous happenstance recoveries of sagacious messages – unlike the myth positing that a close encounter with an owl is an indication that death is near – is false. Turns out a guy named Max wrote the Desiderata.

Having almost uniformly failed the research paper recently assigned, my students were excited at the prospects of an extra credit assignment, which consists of reading Desiderata and isolating two stanzas. Two stanzas, two responses, minimum two paragraphs per response. Tomorrow I want to ask them if they got anything out of it or if they thought it was mushy sentimental bullshit. You see, I have this sense that they may have a complicated relationship with bits of counseling that run like, “You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here” or “With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.”

Sometime between the age of 11 and 17 I started becoming indignant about anything that sounded remotely like Desiderata. I’d see it in family rooms of houses where families were holding celebratory parties for baptisms, weddings, graduations, etc. – standard fare red juice with little napkins to put carrots and that sugar-saturated, cavity-inducing cake – and as a kid I somehow associated the stupidity of these functions with the thing up there on the wall I painstakingly copied down in the notebook, and I somehow felt duped, which was gasoline on my angst-ridden teenage heart. Why didn’t I recognize this as a concatenation of fortune cookie sayings from the start, rather than the mysterious musings left behind by someone who seemed to have figured something out, which is what I took it be at first? Now – no surprise – I’m swinging back towards being mildly interested and open to this Desiderata, and I don’t know what that means, anymore than I know what “Desiderata” means. Is “you are a child of the universe” is really worth getting indignant about? Because I do like the idea of going placidly amidst the haste, especially as it seems to outlaw the possibility of procrastinating for hours in an uncomfortable chair and chain-smoking Camels with bad backpacker hip-hop on the stereo.

My students have an unpredictable response to baldly expressed sentiment – sometime they fall for it with a kind of abashed, I-couldn’t-help-myself charm and other times they revolt and accuse me of being a soft-headed blanket-coddling sap. They don’t say that, but it’s pretty apparent from the silent ceiling staring that that’s what they are thinking. I’m interested to see if this even registers with them, especially as I’ve tried to stay away from proselytizing in the Dave Pelz/Chicken Soup for the duration of my tenure here.

It doesn’t seem like the empirical evidence would indicate many Americans actually hold to the advice proffered in these stanzas; they serve more like psychological ballast to prevent feelings of doom from taking pride of place in middle class milieus. Is there anything wrong with that? Not really. Being older means being less willing to traffic in the airtight black/white demarcations of right and wrong, unless being older just means being more distracted from the fundamental aspects that make such demarcations possible or desirable. So, yes – I’m hoping for full-fledged blanket condemnation of Desiderata’s syrupy sentiments and a full-scale awestruck acceptance of the way in which Desiderata’s words illuminate something about going forth in the world that tends to get lost behind all the theatrics on the surface. Tomorrow I want both the black and the white, the pure teenage pronunciations in absolute terms, because soon enough I won’t have the chance to witness that unblemished, indignant self-righteousness that tends to diminish over time.