[lit-ideas] Commencement
- From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 17 May 2006 00:41:38 -0700
Living 'the story of your life'
A 1970 Reed graduate tells the class of 2006 their lives are already in
motion
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
SHELBY OPPEL WOOD
The Oregonian
Tamim Ansary, a writer who emerged on the nation's radar via an e-mail
he wrote to friends after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, didn't
attend his own Reed College graduation. Such a public ritual didn't seem
right for capturing the meaning of a moment that, to him, seemed
entirely personal.
But 36 years can change a man's mind. At the invitation of Reed seniors,
Ansary returned Monday to the Southeast Portland campus to address the
287 members of the class of 2006, as a warm breeze ruffled the sides of
a white tent erected for the ceremony.
The son of an Afghan father and American mother, Ansary, 57, was raised
in Afghanistan among a large, tightknit clan descended from a
seventh-century family in Arabia who helped the Prophet Muhammad escape
from Mecca to Medina. Ansary's uncles include a general and a government
minister; his Western-educated father taught science and literature at
Kabul University.
He left Afghanistan at age 16, in 1964, before the country was overrun
by the Soviets, then warring ethnic factions, then the Taliban. He went
to high school in Colorado, then to Reed.
After graduation in 1970, "I spent another six tumultuous years in
Portland as part of a counterculture . . . we were ardently immersed in
building the pure new civilization," one with community gardens and food
co-ops and a collectively owned newspaper, the Scribe, for which he
wrote, Ansary told the Reedies…
"We really thought we were going to build a world of peace and love and
justice and harmony . . . and our days were filled with meaning," he said.
That period, Ansary said, seemed to have the potential to define not
only his life but also the direction of modern society.
"But the years passed and the juggernaut of industrial modernity hurtled
on," he said, and it was the counterculture that crumbled and "we who
scattered to the many winds, to become sales executives and lawyers and
math professors and carpenters' wives."
Soon after, in his early 30s, Ansary set out for North Africa and
Turkey, with hopes of entering Pakistan and returning to Afghanistan. In
his 2002 memoir, "West of Kabul, East of New York," he wrote that he
hoped for a better understanding of Islam, the religion he had grown up
in but ultimately abandoned.
He never made it to Afghanistan and came away traumatized by the rigid
version of Islam he encountered in his travels, a "darkening world" that
was not his, he wrote in his memoir. Back in the United States, "(I)
took up my life as one unconflicted soul: Tamim Ansary, American guy."
He thought the Afghan chapter of his life was in the past. He married an
American, settled in San Francisco, had two daughters. He worked as a
textbook editor and wrote children's books and educational software. He
is now a columnist for Encarta.com.
Then came the 2001 terrorist attacks.
After hearing angry, scared Americans on talk radio demanding that the
United States wage war on Afghanistan and "bomb them back to the Stone
Age," he typed an e-mail to a small circle of friends.
"I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden," he wrote.
But it's the people of Afghanistan who were "the first victims of the
perpetrators."
"Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their houses?
Done. . . . Flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn't really be a
strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually, it
would only be making common cause with the Taliban -- by raping once
again the people they've been raping all this time," he wrote.
Before the week's end, "World News Tonight" and the "The Oprah Winfrey
Show" were calling. Ansary suddenly found himself an unlikely spokesman
for Afghans and for Islam. But he hadn't seen Afghanistan in 36 years
and had become, as he has written, "the most secular of men."
Still, the e-mail had taken flight. The memoir followed. A New York
Times reviewer called it "a book that steadies our skittering compass .
. . (that) sees things we cannot make out, and need to."
Ansary's Afghan chapter, as it turned out, wasn't over.
On Monday, he didn't tell Reedies to aim high or go for the gold or
dream big. Graduates -- whether at Reed or any college -- are often told
that their lives are about to begin. Ansary seemed to argue against that
notion:
Life is already in motion. Every moment, including this one, he said, is
part of the arc.
"I'm saying, you live the story of your life. . . . Every moment
contains where you're coming from and where you're going to," he said.
Chapter 25 of a novel may be beautiful, he said, but you can't
appreciate it without Chapters 1 to 24.
"What lifts any story to greatness is not the particular events of the
plot, but how the plot unfolds toward meaning," he said. ". . . Only
death releases us from the present moment to become our whole lives. At
every other moment, we're contributing to what that whole life will have
been."
For information about Ansary, see www.mirtamimansary.com
Shelby Oppel Wood: 503-221-5368; shelbyoppel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
©2006 The Oregonian
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Forwarded by Robert Paul
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