PhotograPhS by robert FalCetti, Peter Frew ’75 and highPoint PiCtureS
tommy head robertShaw ’14 monitor I’d like to start with an excerpt from a play we read this year in Humanities called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. You may remember those names from Hamlet, maybe not. Tom Stoppard’s existentialist interpretation of the two characters offers great insight on what it means to stay and what it means to leave. In this excerpt Rosencrantz and Guildenstern argue on whether or not they should leave the stage—bear with me. He said we can go, cross my heart. I like to know where I am. Even if I don’t know where I am, I like to know that. If we go, there’s no knowing. No knowing what? If we’ll ever come back. We don’t want to come back. That may very well be true, but do we want to go? We’ll be free. I don’t know. It’s the same sky.
124th CommenCement
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I have been very afraid of leaving this place. Afraid because I love Taft and the people sitting before me and behind me so deeply, because I know moving changes things, that people may not come back the same way; some may not come back at all. I know I’m not alone in that fear. But I know also that it’s not the only response to leaving Taft. < head monitors Tommy Robertshaw ’14 Some people can’t wait to get—as they say— “outchyea,” and that too is a valid feeling to have. and Madison Olmstead ’14 carry the class brick But here is what I think is true for all of us wearing toward its new home in red and blue today: this mattered. No matter how the wall of Centennial. you feel about this place on an individual level, whether you hated it or loved it, your years or year at Taft mattered; because here we were made to think, we were made to try, we were made to feel. In the last week we’ve talked a lot about what makes our class exceptional. Our desire for excellence, innovation, improvement; our restless spirit; our connectedness with the entire student body. At a pivotal moment like this it’s easy for any class to be unabashedly egocentric, to believe that we’re the best that ever was, and I think that’s okay. I think we’ve Taft Bulletin SuMMer 2014 49