Ordinary People

My friend Scott wrote a fantastic post the other day about being ordinary.  In it, he recommends this article from the New York Times site.  In it, author Alina Tugend wades into the world of American Exceptionalism and how today's young people are being affected by the mentality that everyone must be exceptional.  She is, of course, responding to David McCullough, Jr.'s now wildly-famous commencement address.  In case you are one of the few (like me) who have not yet seen/heard it, here it is:



My favorite parts include the following maxim: "If everyone is special, no one is" and this bit of priceless advice, which I think has guided my own life and I hope will guide the lives of my children:

Resist the easy comforts of complacency, the species glitter of materialism, the narcotic paralysis of self-satisfaction.  Be worthy of your advantages, and read.  Read all the time, read as a matter of principle, as a matter of self-respect.  Read as a nourishing staple of life.

There is much more good in this speech and in Tugend's article.  In particular, I connected with her use of George Eliot's Middlemarch, upon which I wrote my Honor's Thesis in college.  She quotes the last lines of that great book:

For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

And upon reading those words again, I was reminded of a passage from Les Miserables.  After several pages of listing the day-to-day happenings of 1817, most of which I did not understand, Hugo writes:

Such was the confused mass of the now-forgotten events that floated like flotsam on the surface of the year 1817.  History ignores almost all these minutiae: it cannot do otherwise; it is under the dominion of infinity.  Nonetheless, these details, which are incorrectly termed little - there being neither little facts in humanity nor little leaves in vegetation - are useful.  It is the features of the years that makes up the face of the century. (119)

Like my friend, I want an ordinary life.  I want my children to do what they love and believe in regardless of who sees them.  I want to live faithfully a hidden life.