Baccalaureate Address by Michelle Wilband

Delivered May 29, 2025

First of all I want to thank my friend the Chaplain for inviting me back to King’s to speak to you on the day of your Encaenia. We’ve known each other for a very long time, and I think he guesses that of all the cohorts of students that I’ve been given to know over my years as a teacher in the Foundation Year Program, in all sincerity, this class in particular remains close to my heart, and will continue in my memory for a long time to come. Having been present with many of you at the beginning of your degree – in the thicket of a difficult and memorable FYP year – now it’s an especial honour to be able to address some of you, here, at the end –  in the company of your friends and loved ones, on a happy occasion, as you take your leave of this altogether formative chapter of your life. So thank you, all of you, for coming and taking the time to participate in these ceremonies and rites that culminate your experiences here. They are not meaningless –neither the experiences, nor the rites that culminate them. These ceremonies of celebration – performed in the presence of both the college community and those most personally dear to you – conclude and provide a sense of completion to what you’ve been about here these last many years, helping to integrate and stabilize its significance for you as a person, for your ongoing life as a whole. 

So today we all assemble as your community, your people, to mark and ritualize together the end of your undergraduate years and your departure from this place. It’s over. And it’s done. Today you are King’s alumni and students here no longer. Things will not after today continue on as they have been, either for you or for this college community of which you’ve been such a crucial part these last many years. Your relationship to the college will officially change, as this particular stage of your life now flows ceremoniously and irreversibly into your past. And so this sweet and happy occasion is perhaps also tinged with a sense of loss and sorrow. “Parting is such sweet sorrow.” Nevertheless as this chapter ends to make way for fresh beginnings, and as you leave the quad today in a more decided and ultimate way than you’ve ever yet done before, your time here will remain with you, continuing to shape and open onto your future in complex ways, by its enduring and active presence in memory. 

I hope that you will nurture this presence of memory in every way that you can – as newly minted alumni of this college. I hope that you will protect and take care of your memories from this formative time – those awakened by the intellectual discoveries of the classroom, as well as those from outside the classroom, which have often been no less instructive. Don’t look down on these memories or take them for granted. Like seeds, they will be able to come alive and bear fruit by your deliberate care, and this fruition will be the most lasting reward for the struggles and effort you’ve exerted here. Not that you should ever falsify your time here by idealizing it, or that you should accept uncritically everything you’ve seen and heard in this place. Along with triumphs and discoveries, there have surely been failures and injuries, and I’m not unaware that more than a fair share of upheaval, grief, and loss has been visited upon this class’ time here. But even from very trying times precious memories can be preserved, as long as we remember how to seek out what is precious. And isn’t this precisely the great advantage of a Humanities education, that along with skills and information and know-how, it might teach us to remember, and seek out, and take care of what is precious in life? 

I can think of few texts that illustrate with more subtlety and insight the deepest value and purpose of education than Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s classic children’s story, The Little Prince. The work is a playful and affectionate satire of all the pretensions of adulthood and what passes for maturity in this cynical world, which has forgotten what is precious and how to seek it out. This forgetfulness leads many in the story to exhaust themselves in a frantic futility that confuses purposeless exertion with the truly serious work of living a fully human life. Children and childhood function in the story as images of authentic wonder, curiosity and open receptivity to the world’s beauties. Children, after all, are the true lovers of wisdom who seek knowledge and ask why, not for power or gain or glory, but simply, because the world enchants and perplexes them, and they want to understand. All children by nature desire to know. And their inescapable dependence and their natural humility drives their pursuit of knowledge into interaction and dialogue and relationship with others. Children, then, are most especially fit to undertake the serious work of being human, of becoming fully human persons, which is also the most essential work of education. And so the recollection and recovery of childhood becomes, in The Little Prince, the remedy for a poisonous and forgetful maturity that no longer remembers how to seek out or keep anything precious.

From the opening dedication, we find these themes of memory and childhood woven with the story’s master theme of friendship. The author asks forgiveness from the children who are his readers for having dedicated his book to a grown-up, but then he offers a most serious and compelling excuse: the grown-up in question is his best friend in all the world; and he happens to need cheering up. Nevertheless, doubting that even this defense will satisfy the rigorous scruples of children, the author thinks better and rededicates the book to the child from whom his best friend grew. “All grown-ups,” he observes “were once children – although few of them remember it.” 

The story is told in the first person, from the perspective of an airplane pilot, who six years earlier had crashed and was stranded in the desert, in exile from all the safety and the distractions of civilization. There he meets the little prince, an enigmatic and childlike stranger, also a traveller in exile, who is visiting Earth from his tiny home on asteroid B-612. The encounter between these two wanderers, their friendship, and their final parting, form the main narrative arc of the story. And this frames the subarc of the little prince’s wanderings, his odyssey of exploration and discovery, and his final struggle to get home. This story of the prince’s education and homecoming is related second-hand by the narrator, whose life has been transformed and immeasurably enriched and saddened by his friendship with the prince.    

We learn that the prince left his asteroid and went into exile because he quarreled with a flower, a beautiful rose that he couldn’t understand and failed to love rightly. So he wandered from place to place seeking instruction and a worthy occupation – “pour y chercher une occupation et s’instuire.” In other words, he’s looking for a good job, and an education that will prepare him for it. In his travels he meets a series of characters, each consumed and preoccupied with highly demanding work, but infected with a senile and joyless self-seriousness that renders their work absurd, draining it of purpose and meaning. There is the King, who takes his own authority so seriously, that he can conceive of other beings only as subjects to be dominated. There is the Conceited Man, who takes himself so seriously that he’s deaf to everything around him except admiration and his own glory. Or the Businessman, frantically calculating the stars, able to see them only as a source of material wealth and gain. None of these characters is able to see things in themselves, as they really are, and so what is truly precious in things remains hopelessly hidden. 

The turning point in the little prince’s story comes when he arrives on Planet Earth. Here the prince discovers a rose garden, bursting with beautiful flowers, all just like the one he’d quarreled with at home. The prince is overcome with unbearable sadness: “His flower had told him that she was the only one of her kind in all the universe.” And he had believed her. “And here were five thousand of them, all alike, in one single garden! [….] ‘I thought that I was rich, with a flower that was unique in all the world’” laments the little prince, “‘and all I had was a common rose’ […] And he lay down in the grass and cried.”

It’s in this moment of despair, loneliness, and painful disillusionment that a wise and benevolent fox appears, who befriends the little prince by teaching him the forgotten art of “taming.”  What does it mean to tame?” asks the little prince. “It means to establish ties” says the fox. “[...]To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys […] To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world […] And then look, you see the grain-fields down yonder? You have hair that is the colour of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will make me remember you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat.” In this relationship of taming, by the mutual ties it establishes, both the fox and the little prince become persons – not individual members of a species interchangeable with every other individual – but unique and irreplaceable persons, each in and for the other. And this relationship, this being-for-the-other, nourishes memory and reveals the world in its hidden enchanted beauty. And in fact, as the wise fox insists, all genuine knowledge comes through taming. A true education takes place in relationship with others, in the personal and reciprocal ties of community. “One only understands the things that one tames,” as the fox says.

Once the fox and the prince have tamed each other and become friends, the fox instructs the prince to “[g]o and look again at the roses.” “You will understand now,” he says “that yours is unique in all the world.” Through his dialogue and friendship with the fox, the prince is now able to perceive the essential difference between his rose and all these many others. Despite surface appearances and a superficial resemblance, the prince’s rose is now perceptible to him in her essence, as utterly unique and inexhaustibly important. For, as the fox teaches the prince: “What is essential is invisible to the eye.” This marks a new and higher awareness for the prince, and this change in perspective allows him to redirect his wanderings and make his pilgrimage home. 

But taming, like any worthwhile education, is a risky business. It doesn’t leave you the same as you were before. In their friendship both the prince and the fox are changed. While the fox has gained forever the beauty of golden wheat and the sweet memory of his friend, he’s also gained a new source of vulnerability and sorrow, for the prince will now depart and he must weep. And for his part, the prince has gained the conscious memory of a truth that only children are serious and brave enough to remember:  “Men have forgotten this truth,” the fox tells the prince, “but you must not forget it. You become responsible forever for what you have tamed.” The prince now understands on a new level his responsibility to his home and to his rose, to those beings with whom he is tied in relationship and community. In them and for them he becomes the irreplaceable person that he is, unique in the all the world. Whatever their faults and shortcomings, they help to give him his personhood: “You are responsible for your rose,” the fox tells him. And this new understanding of relational responsibility has prepared the prince to act in the world, to find and take up his work in all seriousness, purposefully and meaningfully, and even with love. 

And what about the narrator? What has he gained through his encounter with the prince and this act of narrative recollection? He’s gained what he calls “a great mystery.” The prince who loves his rose, and in the end willingly suffers the malice and venom of a desert snake to make his return to her, has caused the whole universe to appear in a new light. And the desert of exile, the place of the prince’s appearance on earth and his departure, has become for our storyteller the most beautiful and saddest place in the world. Perhaps King’s, for some of you, will be remembered as just such a desert, a place apart where precious friends and wise teachers have appeared and departed from you. If so, then for you, the sweet sorrow of this day is not the weary sadness of grown-up cynicism, but the joyful sadness of having been tamed. I hope this Encenia day is joyful enough to be a very sad day indeed. May you be responsible for the memories you bring away from this place. May you stay forever young. God keep you on your way.