TOM HEALY

The Shipwreck of Pandora: Finding Hope in Science

Remarks to the Fulbright Science and Technology Fellows
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Washington, DC

Strange things sometimes happen over lunch.

Take this very day, June 11th. Not here in the humid Washington basin, but off the coast of the Land of Oz.  Onboard a ship on a flat, calm southern ocean under horizon-wide blue skies pierced only occasionally by perfectly-round white cloud—and nothing else as far as you could see.

The June 11^th I’m talking about was in 1770.  And by Oz, as you probably know, I mean Australia.  243 years ago.  It was a warm, but crisp day, the start of winter in the southern hemisphere.

And was lunchtime for Captain—actually, he was still only Lieutenant—James Cook on his famous ship, The Endeavor.  Cook was on the first of his three great voyages of discovery, in search of what at the time he only knew to be some fabled “southern continent” that no European had yet seen.

From Cook’s journals we read

We dined today upon the stingray and his tripe: the fish was not quite so good as skate … the tripe everybody thought excellent. We had it with a dish of the leaves of tetragonal cornuta, boiled, which eats as well as spinach or very near it. 

Don’t you just love the British?

Unfortunately, though, Captain Cook’s midday meal was rudely interrupted. His ship lurched forward and suddenly stalled mid-ocean.  The wooden boards creaked, the crew started shouting. The Endeavor had hit something, but land was nowhere in sight. 

During his quiet, delicious and healthy lunch, James Cook stumbled upon, bumped into and accidentally discovered the largest structure of living organisms in the world: the Great Barrier Reef.

The botanist onboard, Joseph Banks, was not particularly amused or enthusiastic:

The dreadful time now approached and the anxiety in everybody’s countenance was visible enough: ear of death now stared us in the face; hopes we had none but of being able to keep the ship afloat till we could run her ashore 

But free her the sailors did, with the help of the onboard astronomer and a small retinue of scientific assistants and artists. After a hair-raising escape, 11 days later, on June 22nd, the Endeavor steered into a gorgeous bay, then silently up the mouth of a river.  Cook’s next great discovery: the north coast of the great continent he had been looking for. Here was Oz, the great Down Under, a land, of course, that Cook immediately annexed for the Crown, saying it was terra nullius, no one’s land.  Big surprise: he named the river Endeavour and the beach settlement Cooktown.  And I’m sure you can imagine one of his first meals: kangaroo, of course. 

But back to today, that day of the interrupted lunch, the surprise, anxiety, and unexpected discovery.  It took Cook and his men all day and more to free his ship.  So, at first they weren’t at all interested in what they found.  They wanted to flee, to go where they were looking to go.

But by finding the Great Barrier Reef, Cook found something all of us would become fascinated with for forever: one of the seven wonders of the natural world, a great, living, teeming body of undersea life—from forests of anemones to leatherback and flatback turtles to dwarf whales and humpback whales and humpback dolphins, nine species of seahorses, four hundred species of coral and more than five hundred species of algae and seaweed. He found a vast array of extraordinary flora and fauna living as a giant organism, an orchestra of life in harmony.

One of the most beautiful places to see the Great Barrier Reef is evidently from outer space, which, given the damage done to Endeavor, Captain Cook might have preferred.

But Cook’s spectacular lunch spot is in growing jeopardy.  Here’s how to put things in perspective: the first large reefs in the area began more than half a million years ago.  The current living coral reef is itself at least 20,000 years old.  And more than half of it has died in just the last 25 years.

Enough to make you put down your fork. 

I began writing this speech with some excitement about Captain Cook’s spirit, an ethos of ambition that seems to be at the heart of scientific inquiry: the willingness to take the kind of long-shot risk—of approaching the cutting edge, of nearly sailing to the ends of the earth—that Cook took in order to reach discovery. It takes a passion I think all of you know about and have. 

And I still have that sense of thrill when I read about your own research and study, your own ambitions for discovery.  But my optimism and, I’m sure yours too, is blunted by the knowledge of the consequences of human ambition. It is climate change, pollution, even damage from shipping and more than 1,500 shipwrecks that have endangered the Great Barrier Reef and countless other ecological systems in the world, at rates compounding startlingly in just our lifetimes. 

I love the names of ships, their histories.  Endeavor is a wonderful name for an explorer’s ship because in comes from the Latin expression “in dever” which means “in duty,” which comes from the word for debt.  An endeavor is something you owe, which later came to mean “the pains taken to achieve something.”

You’ve been experiencing the joys and pains of the immense focus discipline to prepare for your doctorates.  You’ve been doing something that you owe to your families, your teachers, your countries, to this program.

But let me leave you with another ship, one that foundered on the Great Barrier Reef only 20 years after Endeavor’s close call.  That ship was Pandora. She had fought against the Americans in the Revolutionary War, and on this fated voyage she plied the South Seas in search of the mutinous crew of The Bounty.  Pandora found 14 of Bounty’s crew in Tahiti, including the ship’s fiddler.  But Pandora’s captain wasn’t a music lover.  He locked his fourteen prisoners in in a makeshift cell, just eleven-by-eighteen feet, built on the quarterdeck, and called, of course, Pandora’s box.

And then on the late afternoon of August 29^th,1791 – long after lunchtime—Pandora struck the Great Barrier Reef.  She sank the next morning.  Pandora’s box broke open: 31 crew died and 4 of the 14 prisoners.

Pandora means “all-gifted” or “the gift of all.” Hesiod tells us in Works and Days that Pandora was the first woman on earth, forged of water and dirt by Hephaestus, the god of craftsmanship.  And all the gods gave her presents: Poseidon gave her pearls and the promise she would never drown.  (He obviously wasn’t listening when the English shipbuilders hoped their ship with that name wouldn’t sink.) Aphrodite gave her beauty, Athena gave her style and grace, Demeter gave her a green thumb, Apollo taught her music, Hermes gave her speech and cunning, Hera gave her curiosity.

So the all-gifted Pandora was blessed and privileged, like those of us here.  But, of course, you know she was also born cursed.  It was inevitable she would squander her gifts because of that last essential but dangerous gift from Hera: curiosity.  Pandora just had to see what was in the box – and all the ghosts of pain, struggle and misery rushed out into the world: disease and death, greed and dishonesty, hunger and need.  From then on, all other humans would have to toil, work and suffer.

Now have I gotten everyone in a joyful mood in time for dessert? Shipwrecks, environmental disaster, squandered gifts and suffering.  And add to that the news that, because of budget cuts, this is the last class of the extraordinary program of Fulbright Science and Technology Fellows to fund a small group of the very best young scientists to get their PhD’s in the United States.

None of you is a stranger to hardship.  Even at your young age, each of you has faced failure and loss.  But the thing we can’t forget is what remained at the bottom of Pandora’s box after all the evil escaped. 

There was a slight, meek girl curled up and hiding there, holding a sprig of half-wilted flowers.  Hesiod says her name was Elpis. The Romans called her Spes.  The Greeks were ambivalent about her; the Romans built her lavish temples. In both languages, her name means hope.

You leave here with many gifts—some of them possibly double-edged and dangerous—but the gift I ask you to keep safe and always within you is that small, shy spirit clutching the partly wilted flowers. Because in the end, hope is most necessary, hope makes the most profound sense, when trouble is in the air, in our worry and in the doubts we harbor; hope is what we have taken great pains to achieve.

I’ve gone far afield to the Oz and lands of mythological creatures, so let me come home—to a writer and thinker as American in his philosophy of pragmatism as you can get, Henry David Thoreau, a man who lived on a famous pond but never left the solid earth of his native New England.

Thinking about the way we shape our hopes, endeavors, and ambitions, Thoreau wrote, “Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.” This is the pragmatist’s answer to finding hope cowering in the bottom of Pandora’s box.

How do you take your talents, your research, your skills and put them to use? That seems to be the moral dimension of science: to share with others in order to make the world a more connected, and possibly better, place.

Fulbright—and your work—are about the collaborative spirit of exchange: of ideas, experiences, knowledge, and passion.  

Share that knowledge, stay connected to Fulbright and to one another.  Remember that what you do and who you are must not only be good, but good for something.

Potatoes, Monks, Gossip and Electricity: How Friendship Is Vital to Science

Remarks at the Fulbright NEXUS Meeting on Climate Change
Medellin, Colombia 
April 21,  2013

        T.S. Elliot called April “the cruellest month.”  Eliot made London his home, but even in tropical Colombia people are known to gripe about the year’s fourth month.
 But just after dark, cradled in the gorgeous Aburra’ Valley of Medellin, and handed a glass of wine as I gathered with a group of Fulbright scientists, all friends and collaborators from countries throughout the Western Hemisphere, I took part in an April evening last month that was the furthest from cruel. 

         It was a humid-meets-cool evening that seemed expectant—some electricity in the air about the work the scientists were going to share with one another at a climate change conference that week, about the questions they were eager to pose, the answers they were seeking.

         Pulling those threads together—the moral character of April, the sweet lull of drink, the electricity of friendship and inquiry—I thought about a story I’d read about a different April gathering, at a place and time that seemed so distant, but seemed so close.  On an April day in 1746—247 years ago—instead of Dan Kammen, the famous and charismatic Berkeley professor who was the lead scientist of this Fulbright project, it was a French monk, Jean-Antoine Nollet, who was man of the hour.  Nollet was the abbot of the famous Carthusian monastery in Paris.  And on that 18^th century spring Parisian day, Nollet lined up all his monks, making each one grab hold of one end of a 10 meter length of wire in one hand and the end of another length of wire in the other hand.  More than 200 monks, connected in series, wound through the fields on the grounds of the monastery in a line over a mile long. 

         I hope they were praying, given what happened next.

         Without telling his monks, the abbot took the final stretch of wire that was in his own hand and dropped it into the acid bath of a primitive battery.  The whole line of monks suddenly got a tremendous shock.

         Nollet was fascinated by all the shouts and cries and jumps, the contorted faces of pain. And, who knows, maybe even a few curse words that broke the monastic silence.  Nollet was fascinated because he saw that the angry chorus of monks actually twitched and groaned at almost exactly the same time.  The entire mile wincing and whining in unison.  Quite surprising to him, the electrical current from his makeshift battery traveled almost simultaneously across 2000 burning fingers, two hundred brown cassocks and a mile of wire.  It was the greatest distance anyone had known electricity to travel.  And it happened in an instant.

         Nollet was astounded.  And as Tom Standage so beautifully tells this story in his wonderful book, The Victorian Internet, witnessing and measuring this speed and distance was one of the first insights that led to the invention of the telegraph 45 years later.  Telegraph means “far” or “distant writer.”  Those Carthusian monks standing hand-to-wire-to-hand were the predecessors of wifi, our ability to be connected instantly to friends and ideas, to experiment and debate.

         It’s a lovely sidebar to note that those monks were not just experimenting with electricity in the 1740’s.  In that very same decade at that same Parisian monastery, monks invented the sweet green herbal liqueur that’s named for their religious order: “chartreuse.” Perhaps one of the electrocuted monks seriously needed a drink.

         Given that the audience of scientists I was with last month was all holding glasses, I thought I’d ask them if they knew what other alcoholic beverage was also invented that decade, in fact invented in the very same year as the Great Monastic Shock, 1746.  No hands were raised.  But it turns out 1746 was a good year for jolts to the system: potato vodka was discovered.  Eva Ekeblad, a glamorous Swedish aristocrat—a countess and agronomist and first female member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences—discovered that year that alcohol could be made from potatoes. 

         And what that meant was that while potato vodka made people sing and smile and go all wobbly, Sweden’s precious crops of wheat, rye, and grain could be saved to make bread instead of drink.  And the result was a dramatic decrease in hunger and famine throughout Sweden. 

         Countess Ekeblad also figured out that potatoes could be the source of powdered cosmetics that—imagine this—wouldn’t actually burn the woman’s face it was supposed to make beautiful.  She also promoted the potato flower as something to wear in your hair.  So with a potato blossom over your ear and perfectly smooth makeup on your face, you could brave the long Swedish winters with a smile and a stomach full of bread as you went out to dance and get potato drunk.

Now that is applied science. 

         But I want to go back to France for a moment and that brief April shower of electricity that singed the monks. I don’t know whether or not Abbot Nollet was a sadist, but he was, like Countess Ekeblad, a noted scientist, even though neither of them would have used that word.

         We had to cross the British Channel and wait almost another century before the word “scientist” came into being. And we can blame that on an old poet, one far more famous than unknown me: Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 

         June 24, 1833 in the Senate House at Cambridge University.  We are just at the edge of the Victorian era.  And this is the third meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.  Not unlike the Fulbright gathering I was attending in Medellin, smart and famous people had come from many countries to attend.  

         A young but already esteemed physicist, William Whewell, one of the founders of the Association, stirred the room with eloquent and excited talk of advances in science, about the new rigor attaching facts to theory, about endless possibilities of research and exploration on the earth and in the sky.

         When Whewell finished and the thunderous applause died down after his eloquent, optimistic remarks, the old and ill Romantic poet stood up, haughty and scowling.  He was famous, so everyone knew who he was, but somehow no one expected Coleridge to be there.

         After a dramatic silence, Coleridge spoke. “It used to be,” he said with much distain, “that men of science,” (I don’t know if he’d met Countess Ekelblad or any of the few other brilliant women with the opportunity to study and conduct research) used to be called “natural philosophers.”  But “a man digging for fossils or experimenting with electricity?”  Coleridge scoffed.  Such a man didn’t deserve such a great title.  In fact, Coleridge said, getting even more imperious and saying he was speaking as a “real metaphysician,” he forbade the people gathered to use the title natural philosopher.

         There was a hue and cry.  But William Whewell rose again to speak and he was young and handsome and smiling and confident. Fine, he said. Let’s have a new name.  “If philosopher is taken to be too wide and lofty a term, then by analogy with “artist”, may we form scientist.” 

         There is a wonderful book by the Fulbright scholar Laura Snyder called The Philosophical Breakfast Club, which tells this story of the creation of the modern scientist and the dangerous rift that grew between what became science on one side and the humanities on the other.  And Snyder tells this story through the lives of four friends, William Whewell who created the science of the tides, Charles Babbage, inventor of the modern computer, John Herschel, who mapped the southern skies and helped invent photography, and William Jones, who shaped economics as a scientific discipline.  What’s so moving about Snyder’s book is that she tells the story of four remarkable men who helped create a revolution in scientific thinking, in technology and industry as a story of friendship – and food and drink.

         Now to be honest, since so much of that took place at breakfast, potatoes were put to a different use and I don’t think any chartreuse was consumed.  But the story interested me so much, particularly as I was mingling with a present day group of scientists who were friends sharing meals and ideas, that I looked for more examples of the importance of friendship to the history of science.

         Not surprisingly, there are many.  But what’s funny is that if you Google “science and friendship,” you don’t find these stories.  Instead, almost every listing comes up for the science of friendship, which is itself a fascinating and relatively new area of study begun by Robin Dunbar and others in the last decade.  Dunbar is known for “the Dunbar Number.”  And the Dunbar Number is 150.

         Dunbar’s research showed that humans beings only have the brain capacity to manage a maximum of about 150 relationships.  When we exceed that number in our social groups and encounters, communication seems to break down dramatically.

         But because humans are gregarious and because we’ve used technologies of warning and solidarity since our early history, Dunbar theorizes that language, laughter and even group music-making evolved as ways for us stay connected to a larger group of individuals than might be possible through more directly physical acts of communication like communal grooming, common to our primate ancestors. As Dunbar writes, “Not only can we speak to many people at the same time, we can also exchange information about the state of our networks in a way that other primates cannot.”

         “Gossip, he argues “is a very human form of grooming.”

         And so I went back to that evening Fulbright gathering in the spring in Medellin with heat lightning over the April valley, with drinks in our hands and gossip on our lips and the electricity of expectation linking scientists hand to wire to hand, not just across an 18^th century monastery field, but simultaneously across continents, and I experienced a heady (possibly vodka-assisted) moment of hope that the sharing of canapés and the fruit of fermented potatoes and then lots of coffee and eggs at breakfast might lead to something we might call progress, something we might call science, which after all is just a form of knowledge we can test and use to predict. 

         Science, as that famous showdown with Coleridge began to make clear, is not simply a predisposition to curiosity or deep, serious thinking.  Science is a way of doing the business of inquiry that demands we come together as a community of skeptics and analysts and seek common language and common values, shared trust and shared rigor.  And it turns out that a meal or a drink, or more than a few of both, helps create the bonds of community  that science needs.  We may be surprised, sometimes shocked by what we discover. But we’ll always have ways to relax with fermented grapes and potatoes (or coffee and bacon) to gossip about and question what went wrong or what went right.

Magpies and Wild Things

Remarks for the Jumpstart: Children First Gala
The University Club
Washington, DC
May 8,  2013

         Do you know what a magpie looks like?  You don’t find them here in Washington because it’s too warm.  They like Colorado and London.  But who doesn’t?  

         A magpie looks like a crow in a tuxedo. Black head and shoulders, white wings and belly. You have to watch yourself around magpies because they love to steal shining things.  One grabbed my sunglasses right off my head last year.  They chatter all the time – something I’m accused of doing.  And at night they get together in big groups to eat – just like us, though I’m very happy we didn’t have to wear tuxedos. 

         According to an old superstition, it matters how many magpies you see. Because they eat and chatter together and because they are monogamous and have one mate for life, it’s bad luck to see just one.

         There’s an ancient nursery rhyme:

                           One for sorrow,


                           Two for joy,


                           Three for a girl,


                           Four for a boy,


                           Five for silver,


                           Six for gold,


                           Seven for a secret never to be told.

         I’m talking about magpies and superstitions and a little sorrow tonight because I’ve been thinking all day about an old neighbor of my partner’s and mine who lived a few floors below us in the same apartment building in New York City.  He died one year ago today, May 8, 2012.  But he’d lived a rich, full life.  All of you actually know this neighbor of ours.  He was Maurice Sendak. 

         All of us know and love his work—with its dark, but loving stories of children confronting their feelings—being afraid, being bored or jealous or frustrated or even in danger—in a world that can seem to have too many monsters, too much trouble, too many adults. 

         In an interview for her show on NPR Terry Gross asked Sendak if he had a favorite response to his work. Sendak said one boy in particular stuck out:

         “I answer all my children’s letters, somewhat very hastily, but this one I lingered over. I sent him a postcard and drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, ‘Dear Jim, I loved your card.’ Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, ‘Jim loved your card so much he ate it.’ That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”

         He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.

         And isn’t that just what a magpie does?  The noisy and sneaky little bird with a voracious appetite, eating anything in its path.

         Now if there are any child psychiatrists in the room, you might respond a little differently from Sendak and possibly diagnose little Jim with Pica Disorder, which is the clinical term for when can’t stop eating everything in your path.

         But guess what pica means?  It’s just the Latin word for Magpie.

         Seeing, loving, devouring.  That’s the temperament Sendak had. It’s what all good writers are up to-  absorbing the world, soaking it all up.  

         As the animals say to Max, “Oh, please don’t go—we’ll eat you up—we love you so!”

         That other great New York writer and illustrator Art Spiegelman actually once described Sendak has having “that magpie thing,” a sense “of things you wouldn’t necessarily know all cocktailed together because of the way you find things out when you’re just nosing around.”

         Nosing around. And then, aha: She saw it, she loved it, she ate it.  Not a bad way to describe what happens when we’re learning anything.

         Curiosity, hunger …and love.  This is what good teachers cultivate in our kids.  It’s what Jumpstart does.   Susan Werley Slater, Jumpstart’s Chief Program Officer wrote, “There’s something about the energy Jumpstart brings to a classroom.  There’s something about the connections we’re able to nurture between caring adults and preschool children in low-income neighborhoods.”

         I’m not qualified to speak to you about the methodologies of early childhood education or the metrics of language acquisition.  But I do believe strongly what the educator Jack Shonkoff has said, that “how children feel and interact is as important to their competence and success as how well they think.” 

         Kids must be encouraged with those magpie feelings of curiosity, hunger and love. 

         Remember what my neighbor wrote,  “And Max, the king of all wild things, was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him most of all.” 

          In the end, I really believe education is all about love. Love of words, love of questions, love of the attention, generosity and concern children can feel from adults who care, adults who believe in them. 

         Coincidentally, Roosevelt died only few months before “Where the Wild Things Are” was first published in 1963.  But I’d like to imagine she would have loved it and that Sendak and she might have been great friends.  She had an extraordinary gift for friendship. 

         One of Roosevelt’s friends was the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, a poor rural girl who never went to college but whose older sister was a teacher in a one-room school and fed her hunger, encouraged her curiosity and gave her love. This poor Chilean girl went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature– the only Latin American woman ever to do so.  She also became a leading education reformer, a women’s rights advocate, a diplomat here in Washington, but, as she said, always a teacher.

         “Many things we need can wait,” Mistral wrote. “The child cannot. Now is the time his bones are formed, his mind developed. To him we cannot say tomorrow, his name is today.” 

         “Su nombre es hoy.”

         Whether it’s Gabriela, Maurice, Eleanor or Max, the child’s name is today.   And that is why we are here tonight.

         A JumpStart isn’t something you give tomorrow.  That name is definitely today.

         So fellow magpies, I ask you to jump in and join me.  Let’s help DC kids learn to read. 

         Let’s help them see it, love it, eat it just like little Jim did with Maurice Sendak’s postcard. 

         Or as my old neighbor wrote of his famous imaginary boy Max, “Then from far away across the world he smelled good things to eat, so he gave up being king of the wild things.”

Remembering Senator J. William Fulbright

If Senator J. William Fulbright were still with us, he would be turning 108 today.

That’s a lot of candles.

But with a powerful legacy like his—his legislative achievements, his anti-war activism that inspires so many today, and, of course, the world-famous Fulbright Program—he is still with us in spirit.

Senator Fulbright is probably known to most people as the founder of the Fulbright Program, which is the State Department’s leading international exchange program, sending our best students, scholars and professionals in almost every field to study, teach and engage with people around the world in return for the world’s best students, scholars and professionals spending time studying, teaching and living in the United States.

8,000 people participate in the Fulbright Program each year. From 155 countries. And in almost every field of knowledge, from astrophysics to zoology, Arabic to Zulu, arts education to vocational training. Fulbright has been a springboard for Noble Prizewinners and prime ministers, poets and farmers, journalists and engineers. There’s nothing else like it - building tolerance, mutual understanding and shared knowledge, all to create a more peaceful, more connected world.

But Senator Fulbright’s accomplishments in and out of the Senate extend to an even wider range of legislative and moral victories.

He spent his career forcefully inveighing against tendencies to use military force unnecessarily and he was one of the most vocal opponents of the Vietnam War. He was an eloquent skeptic whenever he sensed we Americans were too sure of ourselves, too unquestioning of our beliefs and values, too ready to hit first, ask questions later. He started the Fulbright program by drafting legislation that required the government to sell war surplus supplies and use the money to start the Fulbright Program in 1946. Later, in 1954, he was the only senator to vote against appropriations for the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, the vile home of McCarthyism.

Fulbright came to his skepticism through acknowledging his own terrible moral blindness: he had been a segregationist senator from the South, filibustering against civil rights legislation on several occasions. The racism he learned to rid himself of and denounce was an enduring shame for which he felt he could never be forgiven, though many civil rights leaders did forgive him and called him their friends.

Few legislators have ever been so skilled at the alchemy of turning hate to good, swords into ploughshares. And that alchemical effect extended to those who knew and worked with him. Think of that young part-time staff member from a Place Called Hope who experienced the Fulbright Effect and became an ambitious young governor and President of the United States.

And there’s that young Vietnam veteran invited by Fulbright to testify before the 1971 Congressional hearings on the Vietnam War, who later became a senator and is now the very Secretary of State who oversees the Fulbright program. In fact, Secretary Kerry created the largest Fulbright program in history when relations were restored with Vietnam. And his daughter Vanessa Kerry was a Fulbright scholar.

And, of course, there are the hundreds of thousands of scholars and students on whom J. William Fulbright and his extraordinary program have worked their alchemy to make the world a better place. Wherever I go and meet Fulbright scholars, they always say to me the same four words: “Fulbright changed my life.”

As Senator Fulbright himself said, “The rapprochement of peoples is only possible when differences of culture and outlook are respected and appreciated rather than feared or condemned, when the common bond of human dignity is recognized as the essential bond for a peaceful world.” And that bond is exactly the one that links Fulbright scholars and students to universities, governments, artists, and people around the world, promoting not only acceptance and understanding, but the exchange of ideas, the transcendent values of knowledge and inquiry that link us all, no matter where we live.

Forty-two years ago this month, John Kerry, then a young veteran, testified before Congress on how to end the Vietnam War. After Kerry’s testimony, Senator Fulbright said, “You said you wished to communicate. I can’t imagine anyone communicating more eloquently than you did.”

The eloquence of communication: it comes in many forms. It can be a simple word. “Shalom” or “Shokran.” Or it can be the nuance and complexity of a full year of living abroad in a new language, a new culture. But to use the language Senator Fulbright would have used, it is an ethical duty for all of us as citizens in a interconnected, troubled and complicated global culture to find the eloquence to understand and accept other people, other values, other ways of living.

Senator Fulbright closed that hearing with the young John Kerry by reaffirming the value of our institutions even in a time of acrimony and distrust, when he told the veterans and reporters in the room, “not to be too disillusioned and not to lose faith in the capacity of our institutions to respond to the public welfare.” Secretary Kerry, now the steward of one of those great institutions, said much the same this week after one of the youngest Foreign Service officers in the State Department, Anne Smedinghoff, was killed on her way to deliver textbooks to children in Afghanistan. Anne was only 25. She had been in Afghanistan less than a year. But everyone talks about how fast she moved to engage with Afghanis, particularly women and children. Because of her, the Afghan national women’s soccer team is on its way to getting its own stadium.

Secretary Kerry said, “Anne was met by a cowardly terrorist determined to bring darkness and death to total strangers. These are the challenges that our citizens face, not just in Afghanistan but in many dangerous parts of the world - where a nihilism, an empty approach, is willing to take life rather than give it.”

Anne Smedinghoff lived by giving, trying to make a world of fewer strangers, less hate and more hope. She was a kindred spirit of Senator Fulbright, who said before he died, that he hoped the Fulbright program and other efforts like it would” bring a little more knowledge, a little more reason, and a little more compassion into world affairs and thereby to increase the chance that nations will learn at last to live in peace and friendship.”

In Anne Smegdinghoff’s memory, it’s worth celebrating Sen. Fulbright’s birthday, his passion for peace and the belief he and Anne Smegdinghoff shared—even in the face of conflict and hate-that there is a “common bond of human dignity” and that it’s our responsibility to find that bond, to strengthen it, wherever we are in this troubled, complicated but increasingly interconnected world.

Troubling the Water

Remarks for the Fulbright Awards in Distinguished Teaching Program
Fulbright Teachers Exchange
Washington, DC
April 4,  2013

         Troubling the water.   

         An old Jesuit teacher of mine shared that expression with me when I was in high school.  He told me that’s what teachers do 

         The expression comes from Chapter 5 in the Book of John. 

         John sets the scene in Bethesda, not our Washington suburb where Bloomingdale’s is, but a pool of water near the sheep’s gate in early Jerusalem, where sick people went to be cured.  Interestingly, “Bethesda” means two contradictory things. In Hebrew and Aramaic, it means both “house of mercy” or “house of grace. But it could also be a pun meaning “house of shame or disgrace.”

         I don’t want to affect local property values, but I want you to hold that contradiction in mind—shame and grace—while I quote from King James version of the story: 

         “For an Angel went downe at a certaine season into the poole, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in, was made whole of whatsoever disease he had.”

         So sickness turned into health, ignorance into strength, a house of personal fear and shame turned into a house of possibility and grace—all because an angel troubled the stagnant waters, stirred fresh air into what was flat and still.

         Troubling the waters.  That’s how my teacher taught me to understand teaching. And it’s stuck with me. 

         Before you worry that I’m going to start giving a sermon, though, I just want to explain that what you do, what all teachers do, is so important, so urgent that it’s hard for me not to talk about it in dramatic and emotional terms. 

         At a time when we are worn-down by the demonization of teachers, by jargon that attempts to measure education like factory widgets, I hope you’ll indulge me a few hallelujahs, a little old-fashioned praise of the teaching profession.

         I believe by troubling stagnant waters, you do something close to miraculous—providing cures to things that ail us: from the diseases of poverty and troubled homes and lack of hope, you offer knowledge and dignity and opportunity. From the diseases of prejudice, you offer tolerance and understanding. From the dis-ease, the un-ease that comes from being unsure of our future prospects, uncertain of our place in a crowded, complex and rapidly changing world, you offer the tools and the strength for students to create meaningful lives.

         John Stuart Mill wrote that teaching is the noblest profession, because, “while physicians only cure one person at a time, teachers instill greatness in many, who themselves go on to do good things.” 

         And there’s good reason to believe that great philosopher.  The idea of nobility actually has its origin in education.  It comes from the word gnoscere, which means “to come to know”; not just knowing, but coming to know, which is learning. 

         Today I understand you’re going to be working with Veronica Boix-Mansilla from Harvard’s Project Zero. Project Zero was started by the psychologist, theorist and Fulbright scholar, Howard Gardner. 

         Gardner created the well-known theory of multiple intelligences, which explains how people learn things in different ways, how we come to know things in so many different ways—so many ways for children discover their innate nobility, you might say—and so there isn’t just one way to measure this intelligence.  Which also means there is far from one method, one curriculum, one strategy to teach. 

         Gardner wrote a book with another great psychologist—and Fulbright scholar—Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who created the popular idea of “Flow,” which is the sense of attention and engagement in work that makes people happy and productive by putting themselves in new experiences, creating a balance between new challenges and skills we already have—stretching ourselves to our limits.

         We know the idea by many names: flow, being in the zone, in the groove—doing something that requires such intense concentration, everything else falls away.

         And when that happens, Csikszentmihalyi says we experience a kind of ecstasy—literally standing outside ourselves—participating in a reality that is so different from everyday life.

         Gardner and Csikszentmihalyi collaborated on a project to blend their two areas of research to explore how the ways we learn, the ways our curiosity is piqued  and we develop passion for our goals in life.  They wrote a book together called Good Work where they argue that, “if the fundamentals of good work—excellence and ethics—are in harmony, we lead personally fulfilling and socially rewarded lives.”

         And I would say to you that teaching is exactly that kind of good work. Gardner said once at a lecture I attended, “I want my children to understand the world, but not just because the world is fascinating and the human mind is curious. I want them to understand it so that they will be positioned to make it a better place.” 

         Making the world a better place.  Teachers help us do that, teach us to want to do that.  If I can bring back the hallelujiah chorus for a moment and steal a phrase from Abraham Lincoln, I would say that teachers are “the better angels of our nature.” 

         You know, speaking of President Lincoln, this year marks the 150^th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, which paved the way for the Thirteenth Amendment.  You’ve seen the movie and you know about the political machinations to get that historic amendment through Congress. 

         Emancipation. It’s a weighty word, but it literally means to take ourselves out of the hands of others.  But then what?  You know that emancipation has meant a long history of struggle for freedom that still goes on. 

         Frederick Douglass said it best: “Education … means emancipation.”

         Teachers set us free. 

         And that’s exactly why we always remember our best teachers because they were the ones who set our minds free, let us see some part of the world that had once been invisible to us, just beyond some horizon. 

         I remember my first great teacher: she was my fifth grade music teacher. I grew up in a very small farming community and had never left my town before until she took us to sing in the county youth choir. Our little group expanded from ten small voices to one hundred and fifty.

         So many kids I’d never met before. So many voices. I was astonished. And I believe Marisol Ponte-Greenberg, a choir teacher who taught traditional music in Argentina, knows a lot about that astonishment.

         But okay, enough of the choirs and the angels. I have certainly never been called  an angel! 

         But like you, I am a teacher.  And I know that good teaching is really not a gift from the heavens.  In the end, it really comes down to hard work.  And today is a celebration of that hard work.  The hard work you actually do: 

         Whether it’s supporting Mexico’s LGBT youth in its public schools as Ileana Jimenez did or helping Moroccan students learn by using their mother tongue of Darija as Farah Assiraj did or teaching Singaporean students that their environment can be used to clean itself up through phyto-remedition as Eric Goff of West Virginia did.

         The hard work of leaving home to go somewhere else, to Finland, South Africa, Argentina, the UK, India, Mexico, Morocco, and Singapore, and to learn and to educate.

         You’re here today because, as some of the best teachers in our country, you’ve undertaken the hard work of crossing borders, borders so often defined by bodies of water—rivers, lakes, and oceans—the real and imaginary waters you troubled. 

         But in crossing those borders, in creating these powerful teacher exchanges, you have actually changed the map of education.  It’s no longer rigidly here or there, us or them, my students and their students. 

         And that, above all else, is the genius of Fulbright. For the past sixty-five years, this program has been a large scale, complex system of making new maps of the imagination, new worlds of exploration and connection—or as the work of Distinguished Fulbright Teacher Lilliana Monk explores—new human geographies of friendship, collaboration and understanding. 

         In a world in which most people—even in the 21^st century—will never live outside the country they are born in, all of you have helped find new ways to unite us 

         Whether it’s looking a group performance in mathematics classrooms in Finland, learning about biodiversity in South Africa, or learning to develop communication skills through art and technology in Argentina, you have all been making new maps of what we know, who we know, and how we know.

         One of my favorite Fulbright mapmakers is Dr. Henry Markram, a Fulbright alumnus from South Africa. He’s been in the news a lot recently for his Human Brain Project, which is a large-scale digital mapping of the brain.

         Dr. Markram is turning four vending-machine sized black boxes in a basement at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology into a virtual networked equivalent of the human brain.

         This is a map of unprecedented scale. As Jessica Pritzker knows from her Fulbright teacher exchange work on neuroscience, the brain has nearly 100 billion neurons. That’s a total of 100 trillion connections.  Dr. Markram’s has enlisted 150 institutions around the world to help with the mapping, that’s how massive the project is.

         And now, own country is getting involved.  Just this week, President Obama announced a dramatic initiative to map the human brain.

         It’s important work. It’s exciting work.  It may even be unsettling work. What will be revealed to us about the nature and mechanics of how we think, how we learn? 

         One thing I do know, is that this kind of quantitative scientific knowledge will never replace the emotional, personal, creative and practical intelligence that are at the heart of teaching- the map-making that helps point us to the future as prepared as we can be and as thrilled as we should be. 

         It’s hard to find the right words for what teaching is.  Beware of anyone who reduces it to test scores or evaluations or even algorithms and neural maps.  

         I’ve looked to metaphors—to water, that gets wonderfully troubled, to the natural boundaries, often formed by water, we have needed to cross, to maps that help us find our way, and, yes, to angels hovering over it all, just to remind us that there will always be something mysterious, something otherworldly about the skills that teach us to comprehend, protect, treasure and live peacefully in this world. 

         It’s the wonderful and urgent mystery of what you do that we’re here to honor today.  And it’s a privilege to say thank you.

The Smell of Jasmine, the Calm of the Crowd

Remarks on Poetry and Politics
Cairo University
Cairo, Egypt
March 30,  2013

         Do you know what a jasmine flower looks like? If you close your eyes, can you see it?  Can you smell it?

         It is the ancient smell of calm.  The cool beauty of the night.  You know the jasmine flower only opens after dark, when the sun sets and the temperature drops. The small white flowers look like the stars painted on the ceilings of the tombs of pharaohs.

         The ancients knew the power of jasmine.  The name is Persian.  It means “a gift from God.”  The Persians, the Greeks, the Egyptians all knew it had healing properties.

         In fact, recent laboratory tests have found that the sweet smell of jasmine has the power to calm mice when their cages are filled with it.  They stop their chaos—running, squealing, fighting—and they lie down together quietly in a corner.  

         Studies show that inhaling the molecules of jasmine oil transmits messages to the limbic system of the brain, the area involved in controlling emotions.

         Have you seen jasmine flowers picked for oil?  I was able to visit a place last year in upper Egypt where this is done.  The flowers are gathered at night when the odor is strongest.  Workers must pick the flowers carefully because they are so delicate.  They are laid out on cotton cloths soaked in olive oil for several days and then extracted, leaving the true jasmine essence.  More than five million flowers must be gathered to produce one kilo of what is known as “pure jasmine absolute.”  The power of jasmine is as strong as it is rare.

         I have been thinking a lot about jasmine lately.  

         This week, many students were killed at the university in Damascus, which is the City of Jasmine.

         This week, I have talked to many mothers fearful for their children in these troubled times.  Jasmine is the flower of motherhood.

         And this week, I was reading the poems of your fellow student at this great university, Mohammed al-Ajami. As you know, al-Ajami is in prison in Qatar, his home country. He is in prison for writing a poem called “Tunisian Jasmine.” Last month, his life sentence was reduced to 15 years.

         15 years for a flower.  15 years for a human life as delicate as a flower.  15 years for poetry, the flowers of language, the intense fragrance of words. 

         I want to talk today very briefly about words and their power.

         I want to talk about the strange bedfellows that poetry and politics make.  They are most definitely relatives.  But their relations are what we might call in the United States “a dysfunctional family.”

         Just two weeks ago, the third Cairo International Poetry Encounter was held.  I was not there, but there were speeches and readings and debates and boycotts. There was the timeless distrust of different generations, the debates over the value of what is treasured and well known versus what is new and strange.  In many ways much of what I read about the “encounter” seemed less about politics and poetry than about the politics of poetry.

         I was particularly struck by the comments of one poet, Mahmoud Kourani who said that the committee that planned the encounter “is living outside history.” 

         Imagine that for a moment.  Who lives outside history? Such a profound and provocative question.  But even if we were to accept that some people are largely spectators to dramatic political events, far from protests or Tahrir, are they really outsiders?  Who decides inside and out?

         The poet Andrew Joron wrote an essay called “The Emergency of Poetry,” which is a play on the title of a famous poem by the great American poet, Frank O’Hara, “Meditations in an Emergency.” O’Hara wrote that poem in 1954.  There was no political emergency in his life in America, in New York in 1954.  In fact, he tells us in the poem that there is only the emergency of his eyes being the wrong color, that he is bored, that he is full of erotic possibility.

         But are these not emergencies? 

         Perhaps the most famous lines in O’Hara’s poem are: “I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.

         That sounds exactly like most poets I know:  I am perfectly reasonable.  I only demand everything.  Right now.

         In his essay about poetry and emergency, Joron asks a question that always gets asked—what good is poetry in a time like this?  He rehearses two arguments—that poetry is politically useless, so it is free. Or that poetry can expose ideologies and speak truth to power, give a voice to the powerless and be a call to action, to counsel and console.

         And then, of course, he discusses all the arguments about this.  Why is that kind of language “poetry?”  Is it really any different from a good speech?

         When Barak Obama was first running for President, his eloquence was striking to many people.  But it also made some people wary.

         Another American poetry critic, David Orr, tells a story about one particular campaign event where this skepticism came out.  There was a union boss in Ohio, an advocate for factory workers who supported Hillary Clinton instead of Barack Obama.  At a campaign rally he criticized our future president, “Give me a break! I’ve got news for all the latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust fund babies crowding in to hear him speak! This guy won’t last a round against the Republican attack machine.”

         And here’s the point: “He’s a poet, not a fighter!”

         As Orr explains, there are two assumptions here: Poetry is passive and spoiled, out of touch and doesn’t know how to fight or get things done. Politics is active, messy, aggressive.  It’s a fight.  It’s like war. And yet, those assumptions always seem to get confused.

         Even politicians speak about how great moments in public life are great because they are “poetic”: the Gettysburg Address, Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech.  And of course, at other times, like that union official, they dismiss poetry as frivolous, the words of the weak. 

         Both politics and poetry are actually all about talk.  Think of how much political talk you hear in this country!  It’s tempting to think that this dependence on works makes poetry and politics quite alike.  Both are about rhetoric and persuasion and both make people listen carefully to hidden means, to subtleties. And both live in the life of the mind more than the life of the body.  Or do they?

         It is, of course, bodies that are summoned to the authorities.  Bodies that face tear gas.  And it is poet Mohammed Al-Ajami’s body that is in prison.

         David Orr reminds us in his essay about poetry and politics that in the English literary tradition, two poets stand out for their engagement in the debate about poetry and politics: the romantic Percy Shelley and the wry W.H. Auden.

         Shelley famously said that poets are “the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which the future casts upon the present … Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

         And then Orr quotes Auden, but a lesser-known passage: “All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is not at all a desirable quality in a statesman. In a war or revolution, a poet may do very well as a guerrilla fighter or a spy, but it is unlikely that he will make a good regular soldier, or, in peacetime, a conscientious member of a parliamentary committee.”

         But as David Orr explains, Auden is actually agreeing with Shelley on something fundamental:  both seem to think that poetic thinking is apocalyptic thinking, that poetry thinks big and urgently, about dramatic change, about absolutes, about utopias and possibilities for grandeur or despair.  Poetry is not comfortable with the ordinary.

         Of course, Shelley thinks this tendency is thrilling: it’s good, it’s something we should trust about the creative imagination, it’s something we should demand.  I think I hear Shelley in Mahmoud Kourani demand that poets live in history, that they make history.

         Auden is much more wary.  He’d like poetry to be comfortable in the ordinary, to be accepting, to be quieter, to be observant, to be interested in weakness. To express Frank O’Hara’s kind of emergency: the need for boundless love.

         But both Shelley and Auden believe that throughout history, the poetic impulse has tended to be grand, romantic, apocalyptic, dramatic, making large claims about how the world is or should be.  Both believe that this is essentially how poetry works.

         And this is how poetry can be like politics, when we think of politics as something more than legislating, as something about a vision.  Every kind of politics—absolute, revolutionary, or just routine and legislative—has a vision behind it, a set of beliefs—“I have a dream!”—that rallies its supporters.  And every politics, revolutionary or conservative, has its poets, poets who mirror the values of their community.

         But here is where the complication comes in, here is where the family relation between poetry and politics becomes dysfunctional.  And here is where we find that it’s often so difficult for different families, with different politics and poetries, to understand one another.

         In America, the poetry that I write, the kind of poetry that most people write is lyric poetry, poetry that has heard Auden’s skepticism about grand claims and large voices. The lyric poem turns inward, it tries to create an entire world out of the inner life of the poet, a solitary, meditative voice, a voice of solitude, a voice of escape, a voice that resists the loudness of the world.  It is a voice that David Orr wonderfully describes as “insisting on privacy.”

         How has this happened to American poetry? 

         Orr thinks it has something to do with the individualism inherent in the habits of democracy.  He quotes the famous French student of the early American experiment in democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville.  Tocqueville was very wary of ways democracy can weaken communities, fray our connections to the past: “Not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants, and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.” 

         In truth, that does sound a lot like America at our worst, and a lot like poets I know.  We feel alone, alone in the crowd of confusions and ambivalence that make up modern life in a wealthy consumer society.  And it sounds a lot like what frustrates Mahmoud Kourani about writers “living outside history.”

         If it is true, if our lyric poetry is in some important ways a function of centuries of individualism, if poets turn inward and seemingly away from politics, then why, Orr asks, does this very poetry constantly seem to insist on itself, insisting on the poet’s right to some privacy, to some alternatives from overwhelming noise, vulgarity and boredom?  If we are insisting, we must be insisting to someone, unless we are only talking to ourselves.

         And that creates a struggle for American poets, because we wonder whether we really have an audience.  We expect people to read us privately rather than to hear us publically.  We do not have a moment of revolution where people gather to hear poetry to give them the strength for the fight of politics.  We reach one person at a time. 

         Are we irrelevant, powerless?  Where is the American jasmine?

         The struggle to get out of ourselves, to be engaged in something larger—the struggle for community, the struggle to be inside history—that’s one of the great struggles of American culture, of the American soul.

         Perhaps, this is the opposite of the soul of the poet in revolution.

         Even if we Americans can have the desire of Shelley in our bones, we live in the politics of Auden, a politics not in upheaval.  True, it is a politics that is often angry and divisive, but it is one that exists more in stale legislative stand-off than in the urgent sounds of change, danger, life in the street.

         It seems to me, though, that there is a place for art, a place for poetry that can be found in the meeting of these different souls.  If we need to turn up the volume and break in to the solitude of the American soul, does it also make sense for artists in times of revolution to turn down the volume, to see also the solitude?  To find something at least acceptable about moments stolen away to breathe in quiet, outside history?

         I can’t answer that.  I even propose it as a question with great hesitation.  I am not living the revolution you are living. 

         But what I do know is that all of our poems—yours and mine—will take on lives, or not, without us.  The political poem may later be read as a love poem.  The love poem transformed into a political emergency. 

         Andrew Joron, whom I spoke of earlier, said that poetry in times of emergency is probably not the poem of anger or solitude, but the poetry of lament.

          “The lament, no less than anger, refuses to accept the fact of suffering. But while anger has some urgent reason, something right now to cause it –He says the lament has a universal cause, and rises undiminished through millennia of cultural mediation. Unlike anger, the lament survives translation into silence, into ruins.” 

         I’d like to end with two poems—old and new, Western and Arab—to look at two forms of lament, that might express he possibility of a meeting of minds, a space where different kinds of poetic souls understand and accept one another. 

         First, the famous English sonnet by Wordsworth, who warns against the danger of the materialist, self-absorbed soul that is too content in the world as we find it: 

THE world is too much with us; late and soon,

          Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

          Little we see in Nature that is ours;

          We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

          The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

          The winds that will be howling at all hours,

          And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

          For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

          It moves us not.—Great God! I’d rather be

          A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;                        

          So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

          Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

          Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

          Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

          Wordsworth offers, in the beauty of this lament, poetry as a modest alterative to “getting and spending.”

         I think this rhymes with another lament for and of the present moment, a lament that is formed in the question and hopeful definition of poetry that we can find in an excerpt from Saadi Youssef’s Nostalgia, My Enemy:

Is poetry merely a reading of life?

I believe it is deeper and more vast than that.

Humans have numerous ways of reading their life, including science and politics.

But poetry is a different matter.

If science and political struggle promise and prepare for another time, poetry is current, direct and immediate. I mean that poetry’s ability to read, participate, and change is more effective and deeper in the veins.

Poetry is transformative.

          On the street, in our hearts, quiet or loud, urgent or anxious, populist or solitary, on this much we can agree: our lives must be transformed.  That is what good poetry does, what all good art does.  And, in fact, it is a pretty good definition of what politics should be: a way to transform our lives.

         So here we are in the dysfunctional family where both are necessary, both are related, both so often at odds, so full of heat and anger.  Perhaps what we need is some jasmine, some cool weather, the darkness and stars, a sweet scent that can make us remember what’s beautiful, that magically, even in emergencies, can make us calm.

SEEING FIRE IN THE CLOUDS

Essay on the winner of the 2013 TED Wish Prize
TED/The Huffington Post
Long Beach, California
February  27,  2013

         Last night, as I listened to famed educator Dr. Sugata Mitra speak at the TED Conference, I thought about the impossible.  Mitra had just won TED’s 2013 Wish Prize: $1million to do something powerful, dramatic, profound to make the world a bit better and to inspire broad, grassroots participation across the globe.

         Dr. Mitra was talking about children.  He was describing some experiments he’s done that led him to develop SOLE—self-organizing learning environments.  The idea came out of Mitra’s thinking about a critical paradox in education:  how difficult it is to find good teachers where they are needed most, in low-income and rural areas where people are too poor and the neighborhoods too dangerous, too out of the way to attract the necessary educators. It’s not only difficult, it’s often impossible. 

         He is fond of quoting the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke: “If children have interest, then education happens.” There’s no fiction in that.  Just truth and common sense—that Dr. Mitra has backed with serious science and research. But how do you get kids interested if there are no teachers for them?

         That got me thinking about something else Arthur Clarke said that I love to quote: “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”  And that’s what Mitra believes we must do to to make the radical changes necessary for education in this new century: we must venture into the impossible.  That’s what Mitra’s experiments did, and out of the impossible, he came back with the incredible: an approach to education in which children learn to teach themselves, in small groups, everything from English to brain science. A little speculation, a little science fiction, a lot of dedication—and suddenly we go from paradox to the possible.

         In a world of cynicism and defeat about education, with reduced budgets and restricted approaches to learning, where innovation is too often kept at arm’s length by lotteries and districting, Dr. Mirta’s SOLE idea emerged out of his famous hole-in-the wall experiments. It is an innovation that emerged out of Mirta’s almost child-like playfulness and quiet observation, a radical openness to just watching poor kids and listening to them to see what they did on their own with computers—but without assumptions, without vested interests, without teachers.

         Some of our most interesting accomplishments today meet, like Dr. Mirta’s learning environments, at the intersection of technology and education: the MOOCs of Harvard and Penn, where 30,000 students, including a U.S. Senator, are studying modern poetry with professor Al Filreis; MIT, Harvard, and Berkeley’s collaborate, web-based learning initiative, EdX, is another. These online strategies are new, but have already accomplished much. However, with Dr. Mitra’s approach, we can finally begin to see a web-based learning system for children that is limited only by our questions and curiosity. The more children ask, the more they seek to learn, the more what Mirta calls a virtual “school in the clouds” can grow.

         For all the newness of this approach, what interests me most is the history of Dr. Mirta’s experiments and the debt they owe to the thinking of one of the 19th century’s greatest educators: Maria Montessori.

         While studying in Rome, Montessori isolated at a young age the biggest problem in education: the lack of focus on the student. As she said later, “No social problem is as universal as the oppression of the child.” Montessori also said, “Our care of the child should be governed, not by the desire to make him learn things, but by the endeavor always to keep burning within him that light which is called intelligence.” More than one-hundred years later, there are strong echoes of Montessori in the passionate and provocative philosophy Dr. Mitra espoused in his TED wish: that education should be less about teachers teaching and more about children learning—by teaching themselves and one another.  

         Mitra developed his philosophy by watching children in slums who had no teachers and still showed remarkable abilities to learn.  He discovered what children already know: there are virtues in some cruel necessities.  Children can teach themselves if we let them.

         It’s a philosophy that’s actually being put in practice all over the United States and the world. In the U.S., educators like Geoffrey Canada in Harlem have renewed the 19th century’s spirit of innovative, self-directed education, creating classrooms that draw their energy on the freeflow of community, rather than the intense, rote question-and-answer classroom. 

         As Marie Montessori said more than a hundred years ago, education must be about keeping the flame of curiosity burning. It’s a powerful metaphor. And, in fact, we heard it at another TED Talk yesterday when Stuart Firestein quoted the poet W.B. Yeats: “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”  If that seems eloquent but too intangible when the issues of education policy and cost seem so complex and daunting, I think it’s worth thinking about in the simple terms of that old proverb about how it is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.

         TED’s million-dollar prize will certainly light quite a few candles. But for each of us, it really only needs to be one candle at a time—one child at a time, whose curiosity we’ll take responsibility for nurturing.  Forget all the testing and policy-making and top-down education factory building.  Just one child, one flame.  From each of us.  And suddenly the sky will brighten, Mitra’s school in the cloud will billow with illumination.  And the impossible might just become possible.  We certainly need it to be.

Good Work

         

        

         A white-knuckle trip, but, as you can see, I made it. I took my first shower in weeks and back on terra firma at a more sensible altitude,  I had my first cocktail.  Who knew you could get a perfect martini at the Dwarikas hotel?

         In my freshened state, and in the nick of time, I made it across Kathmandu’s chaotic unpaved streets to a gathering of Nepali Fulbright alumni celebrating the 60 anniversary of the program in their country.  There was a long line waiting, hundreds of people who had come to greet the ambassador and me.

               

         From each, a slight bow.  Hands pressed in greeting. Namaste. And I smiled and did the same.

         At the end of the line there was a small man in his late 8o’s.  He slowly walked up to me.  But when I bowed, he took my pressed hands  in his own and I realized he was holding a frayed and folded piece of paper he wanted me to look at.  

         I unfolded the paper.  It was a letter from 1953 signed by Senator J. William Fulbright congratulating this man on his award.

         It is difficult to describe my emotions in reading the letter and holding that broad man’s hand.  I am no Senator Fulbright.  

         

         

         But since I am chair of the Fulbright board, my signature does go on similar letters to the thousands of Fulbright students and scholars going to more than 150 countries this year.

         The man could see I was deeply moved.  He smiled and said four words that I have heard unceasingly in the year and a half I have been on the Fulbright board.  He said, “Fulbright changed my life.”

         World leaders, Nobel Prize winners, poets, climate scientists, journalists, public health specialists, astronomers, engineers, filmmakers, business leaders.  They all say the same thing: “Fulbright changed my life.”

         Hearing that so often fills me with deep admiration for the genius Senator Fulbright had in creating this program.  But it also gives me pause.   Whatever we do, we can’t screw this up.  Our job is to preserve this extraordinary legacy of international exchange and to extend the opportunity to countless more people.  Their lives will be changed and they will change the lives of others.  

         You can think of a map of the world as a vast network of all these connected lives.  A wounded but hopeful world – not flat, but more tightly-woven, more interdependent, more shared.  

         When I hear those words “Fulbright changed my life” I think of four other simple powerful words that President Obama often speaks when he reaches out to people in this divided time, “We’re in this together.”

         

         Csikszentmihalyi, a famous psychologist and himself a prominent Fulbright scholar, created the popular idea of “Flow,” which is the sense of attention and engagement in work that makes people happy and productive by putting themselves in new experiences, creating a balance between new challenges and skills we already have – stretching ourselves to our limits.

        

         We know the idea by many names: flow, being in the zone, in the groove – doing something that requires such intense concentration, everything else  falls away.

         And when that happens, Csikszentmihalyi says we experience a kind of ecstasy – literally standing outside ourselves – participating in a reality that is so different from everyday life.

         In other words, exactly what is meant when people say, “Fulbright changed my life.”

         There is a story about the great modernist painter, Willem De Kooning:

         A New York Times reporter was doing a piece on De Kooning and asked to observe him painting. De Kooning told him to occupy the building across the street and watch him from there. The reporter did.  And he waited there for two days.  

         Nothing happened.  De Kooning didn’t paint.  He sat in a chair and listened to music.

         

         The genius of Fulbright is that we don’t just wait for people to find that state.  The whole idea of the exchange of people and ideas is that they are thrown outside their comforts – a new language, a new city or village, new friends and colleagues, different weather.  

         And then extraordinary things happen.  

         

         Csikszentmihalyi has made a very interesting observation about how this works: “If you are interested in something, you will focus on it.” Obvious enough.  But, crucially, he adds, “and if you focus attention on anything, it is likely that you will become interested in it.”

         “Many of the things we find interesting are not so by nature, but because we took the trouble of paying attention to them.”

         At its core, Fulbright is all about taking the trouble of paying attention.  Looking at the larger world, encountering people, experiences, values, and traditions different from our own.

         

         Csikszentmihalyi took his notion of “Flow” and worked with Howard Gardner on his theory of multiple intelligences and wrote a book together called Good Work where they argue that, “if the fundamentals of good work – excellence and ethics – are in harmony, we lead personally fulfilling and socially rewarded lives.”

        

         Fulbright is good work.  It is good work done by extraordinary people.  Yes, they are fulfilled and rewarded.  But because of their linkages across the globe, because of what they do on their Fulbrights, they fulfill and reward others too. As Gardner said at a lecture I attended, “I want my children to understand the world, but not just because the world is fascinating and the human mind is curious. I want them to understand it so that they will be positioned to make it a better place.”
         

         Could there be a better way of expressing the critical role of international education and programs like Fulbright?

         Fulbright changes lives.  And the world gets a little better.  

         It’s a privilege to play a small part in that mission.  And I am so grateful to our partners such as IIE who play a profound role in the success of Fulbright.  There is much to do.  The world is out there.  And it is not waiting.

         Thank you.

 

THE STORM DEMON, FATHER OF ALL MONSTERS

Remarks at the Fulbright NEXUS meeting on Climate Change
Banff Springs, Canada
Friday, November 9, 2012

         So on my journey through turbulence, delays, lightning and then icy roads to get here, I couldn’t help but think it must be a wry climate scientists joke for all of us to be gathering in this rugged, Canadian Rockies winter wonderland, where it’s 8 degrees and snowing outside, to discuss…global warming.

         I noticed that other guests in this lodge are gathered around fireplaces, laughing and drinking.  But somehow I don’t see this group of climate scientists sitting very comfortably around the hearth, listening to the crackling of more carbon spewing into the atmosphere.

         So I ask you to use your powers of imagination to conjure a fire for us to gather around—because I want to tell you a story.  The story of a monster. The father of all monsters, in fact, according to Greek mythology.

         His name was Typhon, the storm demon.  The word means smoke, darkness.  Typhon stole Zeus’s thunderbolts and transformed himself into the most destructive, fearsome monster in all of nature. Typhon had the scaled, coiling body and tail of a giant viper, with a fierce Schwartzenegger super-human torso that could suddenly heave itself up from the dust of a village or from the mild surf of a calm sea into a dark rage that would blacken the sky and touch the stars. Typhon’s back was covered in wings that whipped up vast, apocalyptic winds. His arms could quickly circle the world and suffocate cities. And the tips of his fingers were giant dragon-heads, spitting fire and ash. Lightning flashed from his eyes.  The violence of his voice was deafening.

         Recently, fierce Typhon fathered a little girl. Her name was Sandy. We’ll come back to her.

         Over millennia, of course, Typhon has had countless children. The word typhoon comes from his name, and it has cognates in Arabic and Persian.  But before modern storm forecasting, actual hurricanes were rarely given names, mostly because no one had the ability to see them coming.  With advances in weather science, the urgency of keeping track of destructive weather systems during WWII gave meteorologists the idea of naming these storms.

         1947 saw the birth of the first American hurricane child with a name:  a boy, George. (There was another birth in 1947, by the way, that has been a much more creative, constructive force. The first Fulbright scholars went out into the world that year.  You are joining a remarkable lineage, now mid-way through its seventh decade.) But back to Typhon’s children. Two years after George came the first girl, Hurricane Bess, named for First Lady, Bess Truman. I’m not sure how much she liked that. 

         Storm genders mixed for a few years, but starting in 1953—I guess you could say the beginning of the Mad Men years of meteorology—the guys with skinny ties started using only female name for hurricanes: that year alone saw Alice, Barbara, Carol, Dolly, Edna, down the alphabet to Tina, Vicky, Una and Wallis, for that seductive American who wrecked the royal family.

         And this huge and growing dysfunctional family has worked its way sixty-some years down to ill-tempered Sandy. 

         What’s in a name? 

         Well, Jonah Berger, a marketing professor at Wharton, recently reported that: 

Baby names that begin with K increased 9 percent after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. And names that start with A were 7 percent more common after Hurricane Andrew in 1992.

         Berger says, “It wasn’t that people named their babies after the storms. (In fact, fewer people named their children Katrina and Andrew after each respective hurricane.) Rather, it was similar sounding names that spiked after particular storms.” 

         And then consider the cartoon in this week’s New Yorker Magazine showing a couple hip-deep in their flooded living room. The man says to the woman, “If they want us to take these storms seriously, they have to start giving them scarier names.” 

         There are jokes and there is seriousness behind the origin myths of storms, the names we choose to give what attracts and repels us, the stories we tell about things we struggle to understand.  My quick mix here of mythology and meteorology, etymologies and cultural history is only meant to point to the obvious: science is not the language of everyday culture, even, often, for scientists.  And because of that scientific facts alone have not and will not be enough to get us to comprehend or cope with the scale of the issues our planet faces, the clouds of crisis that with that sweet name Sandy, literally gathered around my hometown within minutes, when the power went out and put half of Manhattan into a week of darkness.

Let’s step back again to language of the Mad Men years, to 1959 to be precise. The seeds of the climate storms and changes that bring us here today go back to scientific debates that took powerful shape in 1959. In that year, two scientists provoked some weather in our intellectual discourse that matters significantly for how we think and talk about climate change – and climate change denial – and how we give name to things and ideas in a world where the children of Typhon increasingly rage wildly. 

         First, there was Gilbert Plass, who wrote an article in the Scientific American using for the first time together in a major journal, the expressions “greenhouse gases” and “climate change,” speculating about how one might affect the other.  And later that same year, another scientist gave a famous lecture, called “The Two Cultures.”  That scientist, the great, CP Snow, warned that we had “two polar groups … at one pole, literary intellectuals, at the other, physical scientists.  Between the two, a gulf of mutual incomprehension.” 

         But Snow believed both cultures had rich knowledge to share, that the gap between them was bridgeable. He dedicated his life to that possibility.  I hope our being here together is further dedication to that same conviction, that we can understand one another and that there are urgent things to say.  Perhaps, though, the gap is not most urgently between us—not between the humanities and sciences.  It is really more that all of us together must find the language to bridge the gap between science and the public imagination, between the dangers the world faces and the complacencies that fuel them.  

         We say that the Fulbright program fosters mutual understanding.  And usually we talk about doing this by reaching across different cultures separated by geography. But there is also an urgent need for mutual understanding between different cultures that even share the same cities and towns and popular culture, but are divided by education, income, opportunities, histories of belief, habits of mind. 

         The urgency is difficult to overstate. 

         Since those two 1959 lectures—the first concerns about climate change and the blunt acknowledgment that smart people could not seem to talk to each other—since then, in 50 years, trillions of dollars have been spent in coastal development, with attendant deforestation, air and water pollution with millions of people pressed, often desperately, into flood zones or on the barren edges of growing deserts, while carbon dioxide emissions have doubled in the last decade, and sea levels have risen as much as five inches—five extra inches of water in the past half century for the children of Typhon to throw at us, while millions of others have no water at all.

         The higher the water rises, the faster it flows because it faces less friction above the surface. So storm surges run inland faster and farther – drowning more of our kith and kin.  The US Army Corps of Engineers calls this the “depth-damage function”: as the waters rise, the damage rises exponentially. My neighbors and I saw this with stunned surprise as Sandy “depth-damaged” New York and New Jersey with speed and ease that we were not prepared for.

         What else are we not prepared for? The National Academy of Sciences recently reported that 1/10^th of the Western Hemisphere’s mammals will likely not survive climate change in this century. Let me repeat that: 1/10^th of all mammals in the Western Hemisphere will be wiped out. As Rebecca Greenfield at The Atlantic reports,

Hardest hit will be primates, including tamarins, spider monkeys, marmosets and howler monkeys, some of which are already listed as threatened or endangered …Nearly all the hemisphere’s primates will experience severe reductions in their ranges, on average about 75 percent.

         The problem is that climate change will catch up with mammals before they have the capacity to adapt.  And because of human habitation, they will have nowhere else to move.

         Consider human habitation itself.  Consider it in just one small, tragic and beautiful place. Consider Haiti where I was last week with the Secretary of State and President Clinton to celebrate the opening of a sustainable power plant, new housing, roads and an industrial park.

         It was a joyful occasion, but it doesn’t change the fact that Haiti, as I’m sure you’ve heard, happens to be directly in the path of a hurricane corridor.  Each year, during the rainy season, it is battered by a rising number of tropical storms. In 2008, four hurricanes—Ike, Fay, Hannah and Gustave—struck Haiti within just 30 days. Talk about the children of Typhon. 1,000 people died.  And 60 percent of Haiti’s crops. 

         And now this year. My own city is just beginning to pull itself out from the havoc and suffering and loss of Sandy. More than 100 dead. Thousands homeless. $60 billion of damage and counting.

         But as a New York Times reporter wrote yesterday, 

In Haiti  Sandy destroyed 70 percent of the country’s crops. Between drought, tropical storm Isaac and Sandy, 90 percent of Haiti’s crops have been destroyed by natural disasters this year.

         Let’s bring this right into this room. I see lots of coffee cups. I’m not so sure how well our over-worked, underpaid, sleep-deprived world of the academy would be prepared to lose our coffee. I had my first cup at 4:30 this morning, which is, to be honest, very, very unusual for me. But my eyes focused pretty quickly as I sat there reading that 65% to as much as 100% of entire Ethiopian coffee could be wiped out in the next 75 yrs. 

         Despite Kyoto, despite the kind of crushing economic, social and historical costs that I’ve just touched upon-despite the risk of caffeine withdrawl—carbon levels are still rising; they are rising faster now than they were 20 years ago. 

         We’ve certainly had successes and can point, for example, to how Europe has dramatically reduced carbon production: 15% in the UK in the last 20 years.  But unfortunately, carbon consumption in the UK is up almost 20%.  The power is just imported from elsewhere.  Meanwhile, three new coal plants a week are fired up in India and China. And meanwhile, almost 50% of US power still comes from coal. 

         And yet, according to Al Gore, in this election cycle in the United States climate change was mentioned less than any time since 1984. Until the final hours and Sandy, of course.  

         The 2012 election was supposed to be, was always described to us as, a “referendum” on President Obama—or, if you take an opposing view, a “referendum” on the policies and values of the Republican Party. Take your pick.  Of course, in one sense, it’s a little redundant to say an election is a referendum because, well, yes, that’s what referendum means: a vote.  Every election is a referendum on an incumbent’s policies.  But in this election debate, people usually meant “referendum” as “indictment.”  

         But I want you to think about another part of the meaning of “referendum” that comes from its Latin roots: the word, in its gerundive form, also means “referring back.” 

         What I want to say is that I think we should think about Sandy in that way.  In a powerful sense, Sandy has been our referendum in this election. She brought one of the most crucial discourses being conducted today back to the spotlight and the public forum.  And what she brought back was certainly an indictment of how little we are doing to acknowledge, lessen and adapt to dramatic climate change. 

         As the great writer and environmentalist Wendell Berry has written, “Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.” 

         So this is an auspicious time for this second year of Fulbright Nexus collaboration into critical and creative ways to address climate change and energy needs.

         Life on earth, in all its flowering, breathing, tempestuous variety is only sustainable if we keep our carbon emissions to under what? 350 ppm? 450ppm? More? We keep crossing one threshold of danger after another.  The issue is not the number.  The issue is now. It is our responsibility as scientists, lawyers, architects, politicians, and artists not only work to reduce these emissions, but to salvage what we can from the wreckage we have already caused. 

         This will require creativity. All of us must become curators and stewards of a diminishing environment. And it is our responsibility—whether scientists like yourselves studying ways to provide clean water, new bio-fuels, and other environmental risk reductions as the temperatures and seas inevitably rise—or writers like myself struggling to communicate what it is like to live on a planet that is so different from what future generations may know—all of us must do something.  Together.  

         Today—or what’s left of it—is November 9^th.  It seemed so felicitous to  be able to talk about bridging divides, creating mutual understanding, sharing urgent ideas for change, on this specific date.  Because today is the birthday of the late Carl Sagan.  No one worked to bridge the cultures of science and the popular imagination with more eloquence. Sagan wrote,

It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure things out robs the world of beauty and mystery.  But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works?…It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it.

         As if in answer to Tython’s wrath, which we have so dangerously fed, Sagan, that giant of science, a bard of our yearnings to understand the universe, asked urgently toward the end of his life that we work “to understand the world in order to save it.” 

         “Our obligation to survive and flourish,” he said, “is owed not just to ourselves, but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.”

         And we know that sprit of inquiry, even that eloquence, can break into political life too. It must.  And we must bring it there. Senator Fulbright himself said, “With a little wisdom and foresight, surely it is not yet necessary to forsake life in the fresh air, and in the warm of the sunlight.” 

         By being here, you obviously agree.  I’m so pleased to represent the Fulbright board, to bring greetings from President Obama and Secretary Clinton and to have the privilege of listening in on some of your wisdom and foresight this weekend.

         Thank you.  

Being Looked At, Being Talked About

Remarks to incoming U.S. Fulbright Scholars to Australia
Thursday, August 23, 2012
National Portrait Gallery
Canberra, Australia 

          At a meeting of the college faculty an angel suddenly appears and tells the head of the philosophy department, “I will grant you whichever of three blessings you choose: Wisdom, Beauty or ten million dollars.”

         The professor doesn’t hesitate for a second and chooses Wisdom.

         There is a flash of lightning, and the professor appears transformed. But she just sits there, sadly staring down at the table.

         One of her colleagues finally whispers to her, “Say something.”

         The professor whispers back, “I should have taken the money.”

         I’m happy to say to the new Fulbright scholars gathered here tonight that we’re so glad you have chosen the fellowship money, however modest it is in comparison with your talents and intellectual ambitions.

         As for the wisdom, we’re hoping that you’ll offer that to us.  It’s certainly been the greatest pleasure, as chairman of the Fulbright board, to be literally startled into questions, fascinating ideas and extraordinary stories through my meetings with thousands of Fulbright students, scholars and alumni around the world.

         So I congratulate you on behalf of the entire Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.  And I bring greetings from President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton, who both believe so passionately in the power of Fulbright. 

         And let me thank the many partners in this great program, at all levels of the Australian government, within the world-class Australian university system and under the leadership of the Australian-American Fulbright Commission, chaired by Vice-Chancellor Stephen Schwartz and led by the tireless and wonderful Dr. Tangerine Holt.  And thank you to my hosts and friends from the American embassy and consulates who have taken care of me all across Australia from Perth to Sydney, Ambassador Jeffrey Bleich, Deputy Chief of Mission Jason Hyland and their wonderful diplomatic team. 

         So here we are in the National Portrait Gallery.  I love portrait galleries. They offer clues into how a country sees itself.  Or how a certain official part of a country sees itself at a certain time and place.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if some government somewhere irreverently carved a slightly different name in the granite and called it the National Rogue’s Gallery? Or at least rogues and saints?

         Australians from every corner are represented in this building: Officials in wigs (and I don’t just mean Dame Edna), workers in coveralls, scientists, socialites, business leaders and artists: the great, the good, the bad, the beautiful and the … not so much. The portraits here tell the stories of Australians by Australians, whether it’s a calm, elegant painting of the prime minister or the big, amorphous, blob-like sculpture you passed on your way in, which might also be a portrait of a prime minister, perhaps just after Question Time.  The artist of the blob, James Angus, is, of course, a Fulbright scholar. And, come to think of it, you’d really have to call the color of it “Tangerine,” though our brilliant Commission director could never be portrayed without heat and motion. 

         A portrait is many things—a representation, a statement, an idealization, even an evasion, always an outright fabrication—but most of all it is a gesture, an incomplete effort toward an understanding of ourselves, where we’ve been and where we’re going. And as the great portraits here (and not here) remind us, a portrait gestures both toward the well-remembered and toward the forgotten.  

         And for that reason, portraits are always imbued with at least a bit of controversy. Nothing is fixed or final about them.  None of them is the last word.  I certainly hope that about portraits taken of me. 

         Some of the Americans in the room will remember, only two years ago the curators at our own National Gallery in Washington bowed to pressure and removed David Wojnarowicz’s Fire in My Belly, which was his video portrait of his religious upbringing.  It was removed from exhibition because some people didn’t like what Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS, had to say, they didn’t like the kind of angry story his self-portrait told.

         Or, down the street here in Canberra at the National Gallery of Australia, you can see Tony Albert’s powerful work about how people are portrayed by others – with the stereotypes, fantasies, misunderstandings and even malevolence that can happen when people want to take our pictures.

         In his work, Albert collected a large series of kitsch souvenir ashtrays from all over Australia, metal, ceramic, plastic, all shapes and sizes. But when you look at them closely, you realize the images aren’t tourist maps or slogans or typical images of iconic destinations.  The ashtrays are all stamped with portraits of indigenous peoples – and you suddenly get a chill realizing these ashtrays were deliberately made for cigarette butts to be stubbed out on the faces of the Aboriginal men, women and children.  These were common, everyday ashtrays that many people had.

         A portrait is always something of a controversy because it risks, but never fully offers, the truth. Whether idealized or actual, whether admiring or hostile, it is frozen and distilled, trying to capture what is never fully knowable. Who is that person? Who wants to know? And why?

         We all know, usually much less drastically, but still urgently to ourselves, what it feels like to lose control over our image-making. A portrait is always something of a controversy because it risks, but never fully offers, the truth. A portrait risks the truth because people are always different from who we think they are or who they think they are.

         But the alternative to the gestures of portraiture, to the attempts at bearing witness and telling stories about people, is silence, anonymity, disappearance. 

         That is the urgent meaning Oscar Wilde also intended when he wrote the now-cliched, emotional truth, “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.”

         But in our age of indescribable narcissism – reality TV shows and the endless assault of people’s personal broadcasts through Twitter and Facebook and Flickr and YouTube – perhaps we’re at no risk of people not being talked about – or at least not talking about themselves.

         All is bared. All is out there. TMI.  Too much information. (I have a running joke with people in government about how often they use acronyms.  But a consular officer told me that if TMI were a government acronym it would mean “Totally my idea.”)  In any case, showing us supposedly everything 24/7 isn’t the same as telling the truth or even telling us a good and necessary story.  The truth is hard to find.

         And so, many stories are not told.  Billions of people, critical ideas, endless discoveries and rediscoveries are waiting out there – as are endlessly subtle, brave, elegant and accurate ways of telling them, ways that just might not fit into 140 characters typed with your thumbs.

         So, Fulbright scholars, we are actually very eager for you to talk about yourselves, to talk about others, when what you’re trying to share is something different, something urgent, something that will do good, even if it is just to wake us up from some complacency.  

         Taking new portraits of people and ideas and the world means taking the risk of disagreement, of debate, of difference.

         As Senator Fulbright, the founder of this program, once said, “In democracy, dissent is an act of faith.” And here you are down under, in Oz, where, as that great Australian Clive James once bragged, “Democracy works better … than almost anywhere.”  A good democracy is a great place for stories, for inner worlds and out, for seeing yourself in everyone else, for reverie.

         The demoi of ancient Greece were bound into a single state not only by a legal system, but by a national literature of storytelling, of portraiture: Herodotus, Sophocles, Homer. The first image of the Iliad is a portrait of a man.

         And, of course, portraits aren’t limited to the arts. Portraits are written, sung, and painted by science.  Think of the archeological restoration efforts of our first images of ourselves in the caves of Lascaux or the new photograph from Mars last week shot by Curiosity – a portrait of the horizon, above which hover three tiny white lights: Earth, Venus and Jupiter—a reminder that, in the words of astrophysicist Neil Degrasse-Tyson, we’re only “a speck on a speck on a speck.”

         Seeing pictures of ourselves can be humbling. 

         But science paints some essential portraits of us: from Darwin’s theory of evolution to that first famous photograph of the earth looking back from the moon, taken forty-six years ago today.

         Like that amazing bite out of the globe hovering so fragilely  in the black void over the curve of the moon, every portrait is a map, tracking a borderless place of undiscovered depths, uncharted areas of experience and understanding that will never be fully knowable.  We will never exhaust the stories that need to be told, the experiences we need to document.

         As Fulbrighters, you will have the obligation and the thrilling privilege to make unique portraits, stories, and maps of your journey—as did the over 300,000 Fulbrighters before you. And it very much matters that these are your journeys, your investigations, your stories. It is only the entire array, the interconnection of all your stories, that offers the rest of us some glimpse of accuracy. 

         Think of aboriginal Dreamtime, which the many tribes here still tell of in the “Dreamlines,” those songs that record the travel of the legendary gods across Australia as they sang out, in the words of the great traveler writer Bruce Chatwin, “the name of everything that crossed their path—birds, animals, plants, rocks, waterholes—and so singing the world into existence.”

         A portrait can be a reverie.  

         As Chatwin wrote in The Songlines, one of the many, many great books about this country that have nourished me over the years, “Each totemic ancestor, while traveling through the country, was thought to have scattered a trail of words and musical notes along the lines of his footprints,” which not only mapped Australia, but wrote it into existence in the songs of those living there.  “In theory,” he concludes, “the whole of Australia could be read as a musical score.”

         I like the way a Warakurna indigenous artist put the same idea: “All the stories got into our minds and eyes.”  Stories get inside us.        

         Let the stories of Australia get inside you, notice how these stories change you.  Then you change them, make them personal and release them again. Or, as the much-mourned Ray Bradbury, that great, generous, novelist with an uncanny ability to see into our future, frequently said, “Pay it forward.”

          Just keep in mind that we are only a speck on a speck on a speck. And, although all of our talents are limited, we learn far more than we teach. As another Fulbrighter, Rachel Smith, told me a few months ago, “Fulbright is not about changing the world. It is about sharing the world.” And, of course, where did she have her Fulbright?  Right here in Canberra at ANU.

          Portraits? Stories? Maps? Science? Music? Australia? Fulbright?

          I’ve meant to thread together some themes of how we are connected, how great our responsibilities are to connect to others, to share with one another, in our complicated, troubled, but hopeful world.  

          So I leave you with what I hope will be a lifelong task:  Make portraits and maps of the ways you experience this country, understand its songs, tell your stories and listen for stories you will find here. 

          Then bring all of it back with you. You didn’t get $10 million dollars, but we did choose you to go find wisdom.  We will be eagerly waiting to learn what you’ll bring back home, your portraits, your self-portraits, and you.