Hackley: the Home You Choose

This issue of Connections is dedicated to celebration. In the first weeks of June, we applauded our 4th graders as they completed Lower School, and our 8th graders as they look forward to Upper School. We celebrated the accomplishments of students, athletes, artists, and those who simply epitomize the core values of Hackley School -- friendship, character, effort, integrity. Most significant, we celebrate our seniors as they prepare to leave this Hilltop. Each year, the seniors, their parents, and their teachers gather on Akin Common a few days before Commencement at the Senior Dinner. It’s a time of appreciation, of looking back, yet also of looking forward. This year, Walter offered the following remarks to the community gathered at the Senior Dinner on June 9. While tendered to the Class of 2010, they resonate for all of us.

Trees and stone, grass and wood, the generations of people who have lived, worked, played and studied here. Seniors, members of the Class of 2010, this Hackley is all yours now. Whatever Hackley is and has been, whatever it will be in the future, is in your keeping. In this audience, among your parents and your teachers, among the alumni of Hackley from earlier generations, there are so many who have labored to make Hackley the place of their imagination.

It is now the place of your imagination.

There is nothing you possess as deeply as your own past. Now the past feels fixed to you, an immutable point from which you prepare to move forward. But the past will shift under your hands. What will you make it? The meaning it holds for you, the meaning it will hold for you, will be continually recreated by you in the years and decades to come.

Robert Frost wrote that home is something you somehow haven’t to deserve. You deserve Hackley, but I’d add, home is something you somehow have to choose.

T.S Eliot wrote:

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older

the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated

Of dead and living. Not the intense moment

Isolated, with no before and after,

But a lifetime burning in every moment

And not the lifetime of one man only

But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.

…the past experience revived in the meaning

Is not the experience of one life only

But of many generations.

…We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Hackley will always be a home to you in the future, and if you choose it, you will create it. You will always be welcomed home.

—Walter C. Johnson