"Love and Strife."

   "At every moment, Life demands that we choose between Love and Strife, between the powers that bind and those that loose. If we do not hear the urgency of this demand, it is because we do not live fully in the present moment. Most of our attention streams away toward the remembered past or imagined future, relaxing our bond with the vivid Here and Now until we drift too far off to hear the voice of Life above a whisper....

   "Among the falsehoods which we have given you to believe far too easily is this: that knowledge is an unqualified good. It is no such thing. For insofar as knowledge is power, it corrupts as power corrupts; and insofar as it is taken to be an unqualified good, it corrupts surreptitiously. Knowledge can ally itself with the slightest weakness of character and with any unexamined prejudice, transmuting unjust, intolerant, or self-centered attitudes into the figures of intelligence and ignorance: a latent racism, sexism, or class prejudice can manifest itself as an empirical observation that this or that individual is just not as intelligent as we. Egotism, above all, joins readily with knowledge, leading to the empirical observation that no one is quite as intelligent as we, and to the logical conclusion that everyone needs to be inoculated with ample doses of our own personal wisdom....

   "Only Love can render knowledge harmless. Only Love can transform thought and sensibility into wisdom and compassion. Only Love can bind the separate moments of existence into a whole, meaningful life. But we have become such children of Strive that we no longer understand the universal applicatino of Love. Because Love always involves submission to deep and overpowering feeling, we scrutinize it fearfully from within the protective cage of our current conception of rationality, which is, on the whole, a heartless, soulless intelletualism. Love requires the courage to hazard sentimentality; for the harm done by sentimentality - which can, after all, be educated, broadened, and elevated - is very light compared to the harm done by fear of sentimentality - which, like all fear, is an implacable agent of Strive. Love requires us to feel deeply, and be carried away by feeling...."

William Pastille: Commencement Address, St. John's College, Annapolis, for the Graduating Class of 1998; given on 17 May 1998. (Emphasis added.)