A C H A P E L TA L K
by James C. Hovet ’18 May 3, 2018 voces
Dear Christopher “People ask me, ‘What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?’ and my answer must at once be, ‘It is of no use.’ There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behavior of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation. But otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron … If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life.” —British explorer George Mallory
Dear Christopher Hovet, “WOULD YOU SEND your kids to Groton?” It’s a topic
of conversation that seems to come up a lot at this place. Knowing what you know now, knowing what kind of challenges this place throws at you, would you still send your own flesh and blood through it all? For most, it’s a hypothetical—another way of asking if you think you made the right choice in coming here. But for me, it’s a pretty real decision, because I’ve got you, Christopher, my little eleven-year-old brother, and you want to come to Groton. The thing that people often say when asked this question is that they would send their kids here because of the people, because they’ve developed relationships with the students and teachers they’ve met here that make the long nights in the library or the all-nighters before a research paper worth it. Most answers to this question follow this same formula: Groton is hard but is made worth it by … : by Sunday mornings on the Circle, walks down to the [Nashua River], or nights spent up late chatting idly in the
dorm. These things have even become chapel talk tropes at this point. And yet, while I agree that these are all things that make Groton better, and while I hope that all these things would be part of your Groton experience, Christopher, I think that these answers are all flawed, or at least incomplete—because, and realize that this is by no means the prevailing opinion on the topic, I do not think that Groton succeeds in spite of the long nights in the library, but because of them. Not in spite of the hours lost to Saturday morning classes, but because of them. Not in spite of the challenge, but, perhaps almost entirely, because of it. Over Christmas break I ended up having a long chat with someone I thought I would never really see again. His name is Marco, and he was a senior at Groton last year. When I ran into him, he was halfway through his first year as a plebe at the Naval Academy, and while our conversation started with general questions about the academy and where he wanted to be assigned come
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