To the Class of 2009: you are leaving BC, and so am I. You have been here four years or so, and I have been here 38 years or so.

One of the odd things about students is that a lot of you seem to love college, and leaving it is a trauma of separation. I hated college and was glad to leave it, but that was in the days when you were supposed to hate college. I have, however, loved my years as an English professor. And I didn’t realize when I signed my retirement papers a year ago what a jolt it would be to leave. So we share a common trauma.

I came to Boston College in 1971, dragging a U-Haul filled with furniture, traveling with a wife and two children across country from the University of California, Santa Barbara. I settled into teaching, and working on the research topic that had been assigned to me in graduate school: the poetry of Thomas Hardy. I wrote three books, was tenured, served as chair of the department for the required time, was promoted to full professor. When I thought about retirement, I figured I would spend my days writing brief articles on the books Hardy had owned. I had taken a lot of notes from his library in Dorset, England, back in the 1990s and planned to call each article “Hardy’s Copy of X.” And so I would proceed sleepily and comfortably and end like Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone, playing with grandchildren in a sun-drenched tomato garden.

Then something happened. In 1996, I went to a movie: the director Kenneth Branagh’s version of Hamlet. Every director of Hamlet determines for himself how to use the encounter with the spirit of Hamlet’s murdered father, and Branagh’s Ghost of King Hamlet turned out to be a very Catholic ghost. He regrets having been murdered before he could go to confession, and receive communion and Extreme Unction. I was puzzled to find this material in the play, because I knew that Hamlet was written to be performed in Protestant England, which had declared those sacraments illegal. I said to myself: What is a Catholic ghost doing in Shakespeare, telling his son to revenge him in the big bad secular world of Claudius’s court? Of course we know that Shakespeare was almost certainly raised Catholic. But how Catholic was he as a man, as an artist? And how did his Catholicism live at peace with England’s militant Protestantism?

I should never have asked those questions if I wanted to end my life writing “Hardy’s Copy of X,” because they threw me into a bottomless pit of research, study, contemplation, and imagination.

Let me try to explain.

I grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, in a more or less Irish Catholic family. My mother was big on the Virgin Mary; my father was a lapsed Lutheran who let my mother call the religious shots. Vatican II came just in time for me, though not for some of my friends, who left the Church.

Catholicism has remained personally important for me through my life. Yet it didn’t occur to me through these many years at Boston College that Catholicism had anything to do with being a reader, a student of literature, and an English professor. And then, thanks to Branagh, I began to think not simply about Catholicism, but about its relationship in this society—by which I mean England and America mostly—with Protestant and secular world views.

I’m not preaching for Catholicism, and I am in fact grateful that I live in a secular society (founded by Protestants) in which I’m free to practice Catholicism or anything else. But when I started reading about Catholicism in Shakespeare’s time, about Catholics losing their property, being imprisoned, being drawn and quartered—I was struck by the thought: Hey, wait a minute, those were people like me. (My wife says I am the only person in Boston who remains distressed by the Reformation.)

The Reformation was long ago, but there is still something odd about being a Catholic in a society that just isn’t, and though my children wish I would get over it, I can’t. I have given up “Thomas Hardy’s Copy of X,” and I have taken, as my retirement project, the relationship of Catholicism to its Protestant and secular fellow travelers in works of literature. (And I would venture—based on the reading I’ve already done—that there is no major work of English and American literature in which these three cultures do not engage in a kind of prickly trialogue.)

It may be that some of you don’t know what I mean when I speak of Catholicism, Protestantism, and secularism as worldviews. Let me quickly distinguish them by using the example of the fifth luminous mystery. Anybody know the fifth luminous mystery? The fifth luminous mystery, the fifth of the new mysteries added to the rosary by John Paul II, commemorates “the Institution of the Eucharist.” Now the Catholic view of the Eucharist is that it is the real thing; the Protestant view is that it is “symbolic”; the secular view is that it’s a piece of bread.
I’m oversimplifying, but I think the main cultural struggle in our society is the impossible, and therefore permanently challenging, task of reconciling the competing claims of the sacred, the symbolic, and the critical. Not that there aren’t other important ways of seeing the world. My children, for example, are devotees of Yoga, Buddhist meditation, and Hindu contemplation. But I think that my three mindsets are the fundamental ones for our time and place, and that we are called, each of us, to negotiate their differences in our thoughts and our lives.

A few years ago I decided that if I were ever to do anything worthwhile with this project, I would have to do it full-time. And that’s why I had to retire. Johnny Carson—the longtime host of the Tonight Show—was my negative example. Toward the end of his career, Johnny wanted to retire to do something else, but he was offered $20 million to do his talk show one more year. And he lost a year, one of the precious few left, before he went on to do that something else. I felt sorry for Johnny Carson and vowed I would not fall into that trap. I had enough money (or I used to, before Wall Street collapsed), and so took the big step. And this is where my trauma of leaving Boston College touches your trauma of leaving Boston College.

To my surprise, when I signed the retirement letter a year ago, I felt I had stepped into the middle of nowhere. I was very happy to give up department meetings, and even happy to give up teaching; but those things had for 38 years given me a structure, a boat, railings to keep me safe in storms; and now I was overboard. I wondered if I had made a terrible mistake. I always thought that I valued the intellectual life, the life of the mind, the world of scholarship, but now they were all I had. It’s like saying, I have always believed in God, but now God is all I have. Yikes, I want something else!

I have tossed myself into the same strong currents that are pulling on you. And I didn’t have to do it. So what advice can I offer you, except maybe don’t go to Kenneth Branagh movies?

Instead of advice, I’ll offer you a principle that comes partly out of my Catholic heritage, but also is shared in the Protestant and secular worlds. And that principle is: We need to be ready at any time to lose the very thing that has kept us safe and dry, and we usually have no choice in the matter. You, for example, have to leave BC once you’ve earned your degree; and I can’t un-sign my retirement letter.

So talking to myself as well as to you, and as a person with somewhat more experience of the world than you have, I want to make a suggestion. I suggest that each of us will find that in persevering in spite of our aching losses we discover a miracle, which is that all that we believed and cared for remains true, and preserved, though perhaps in forms we never imagined.

Professor of English Dennis Taylor retired from Boston College on June 30, 2009. In addition to being the author of books on Thomas Hardy, Taylor was the founding editor of Boston College’s journal, Religion and the Arts.