"Walk Ten Thousand Miles, Read Ten Thousand Books"

"This is so nice. Everyone is here together, and the end is near, but not too near."

That's what I told a Chronicle reporter at the senior class barbeque in Cameron four weeks back. Well Class of 2010, here you are together again, but this time the end really is near. Very, very near. In fact, your condition is terminal. To paraphrase the poet W. H. Auden: You thought that Duke would last forever. You were wrong.

Then what? I agree: the thought of life after Duke is utterly appalling. At the barbeque one of you put it this way: Now you will be freshmen in the workforce of life. Starting all over again, down at the bottom again, off in the unknown again, and you may be sure there will be no bright-faced FACs to unload your car this time. Want to stick around a little longer? Too bad! We have hardened our hearts. It's time for you to go.

But not to be totally unkind, I do want to give you a graduation present, and since I wanted to find something that would be valuable for you but inexpensive to me, I have settled on a gift of wisdom. Some months back, I found the perfect thing.

As you've read, in recent months Duke has been exploring a partnership with Kunshan, the municipality just west of Shanghai. The city with the highest per capita income in China, Kunshan has been a scene of breathtakingly rapid development, but though it has attracted a lion's share of high-tech industries, Kunshan knows that it lacks something essential to sustain this development: namely, high-quality higher education. To meet this need, Kunshan has invited Duke to be its educational partner, an arrangement with major advantages for us. As Duke becomes more deeply embedded in China, we will be better able to help our students understand a culture that will be a major player in your future, and so better prepare you for the life of your times.

Now, when I visited Kunshan this January, I was taken to a famous local attraction, a beautifully preserved ancient city with canals instead of roads Zhouzhaung, sometimes called the Venice of China. In Zhouzhaung I visited the home of a seventeenth century scholar who was unknown to me though apparently known to all students in China, Gu Yanwu. In his house, I encountered a famous dictum that I knew I was fated to share with you. My gift to you is this saying from the scholar Gu Yanwu: Walk ten thousand miles. Read ten thousand books.

Walk ten thousand miles. Read ten thousand books. Only ten syllables, and the words could not be simpler; but like all proverbs, the simple words encode a complex message. Let's work it out. To me this saying proposes an outlook in which there is always more of something stretching out before you ten thousand of them, which is to say, infinitely many; a number you will never be at the end of. Further, in this attitude, the self actively propels itself into this space of possibility. The verbs are active, commanding: Walk ten thousand miles; read ten thousand books.

So, the proverb envisions a mind continually active in expanding the sphere of its understanding. But strikingly, in this formula, understanding comes in two ways, not one. This is a command to experience things, to go beyond mere book-learning, to take the infinitely expansive world of human possibility and live it first-hand. Don't just read about it. Get out there! Walk! But the saying understands that if reading is not the whole of knowledge, it is still an essential form of knowledge. Humans are the only creatures who have the ability to preserve their understanding in words, to extend their understanding to others across time and space in words, and to access understandings they have not achieved on their own by mentally processing the words of others. So in this saying, immediate and word-mediated experience are envisioned as equally necessary, mutually supplementary paths to knowledge, the subject of equally urgent commands: Walk ten thousand miles. Read ten thousand books.

This concept will not be foreign to you. Having participated in programs like DukeEngage or the Sanford School internships or the Pratt Grand Challenges, you have already lived the idea of a mutually enriching relation between academic learning and engagement with real-world problems. Gu Yanwu, you will be interested to know, was both a scholar and a soldier, having fought on the losing side in the overthrow of the Ming dynasty. His claim to fame was to articulate a version of Confucianism that brought this intellectual tradition into closer touch with economic and political realities and the facts of daily life.

Walk ten thousand miles. Read ten thousand books. I offer these words in this, your last class at Duke because they bear on the course you are about to set. I've met people (you have too) who, on "finishing" their education, have snuggled into some comfortable niche and lived there contentedly, without the curiosity to take on new challenges, or cross over into other social horizons, or learn things that might require a readjustment of attitude. You know what people are like who never go anywhere or read anything. At first we might say they are "settled." After awhile, other "s" words apply: words like stuck, or stalled, or stagnant, or stultified.

To prevent that dreadful alternative, Duke's chief wish is that you will keep moving, keep enlarging your world, keep opening your self to new challenges and prospects, keep using all your modes of intelligence to integrate new experience into your emerging understanding. You may think I should be congratulating you on the plans you have made for next year. I do but even the best next step will prove a dead end if you don't travel through it to options you now can barely foresee. You might think I should be exhorting you to attack great problems of your day: global health inequalities, or K-12 education, or resource destruction and climate change, or hyperpartisan politics, or creating a financial system that assures prosperity while preventing risk. If you fix these I will indeed be grateful! But you won't be a constructive contributor to a single one of these causes unless you are first a certain kind of person: a person eager to keep learning, to keep advancing from an initial to a deeper understanding.

I'm pretty optimistic that you are not leaving Duke for a swamp of mental torpor. After all, whether you like it or not, what you did here put a mark on you. In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell proposes that everyone who is really good at anything had an unsung prior career, the ten thousand hours of inglorious practice they spent acquiring mastery of a skill. Mozart had to compose all the early works of Mozart before becoming the genius we know; the Beatles' ten thousand hours singing and playing in Hamburg enabled them to become The Beatles; Bill Gates programmed for ten thousand hours before he could become the legendary computer pioneer; Brian Zoubek, Jon Scheyer and Lance Thomas played ten thousand hours of childhood hoops on their way to becoming NCAA national champions.

Now, let's do the math. You may not have read ten thousand books at Duke, and you may not have walked quite ten thousand miles, but you did put in, say, sixty hours a week for forty weeks a year for four years which is pretty nearly ten thousand hours. From this I infer that your Duke career was your time for laying down the foundations of mastery. What skill did you master? Exactly what I am discussing: the skill of active, mobile, many-sided intelligence. Every course you took, every problem you worked, every thought you encountered, every unfamiliar person you engaged, every serious or fun thing you put your energy into accomplishing each of these, and all of these together, were your training for the career that awaits you now, the perpetual push toward broader engagement and deepened understanding that will be your life after Duke.

You played the practice; now for the game! According to my unassailable reasoning, you can't not go on to this success. From ten thousand hours of drilling, the habits are locked in, built so powerfully into your personalities that no thinking-cessation program could break the addiction.

But to be frank, this is not quite true. You have had a wildly stimulating environment surrounding you these last four years; now you have to carry on the adventure without so much exterior support. And some day, you will face the temptation to stop expanding your mental world, to become addicted to the familiar round, and to think that what you already know is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. That may seem like a day of perfect contentment, but it may really only be a day of perfect inertia, the beginning of your life as a formerly interesting person.

On that day, it's my hope that you will feel something itching in you, some trace surviving from your time at Duke, pressing the reminder that there is always more to live and understand. Walk ten thousand miles. Read ten thousand books.

My friends, a journey of becoming brought you to Duke. At Duke you traveled the next stage of that journey. Now the journey requires that you go on to another stage. There's pain in leaving a place and life you loved, but this is a growing pain: its opposite would be not pleasure but stasis or regression. In a poignant letter penned just after he finished Moby-Dick, Herman Melville wrote: "Lord, when shall we be done growing?" He knew the answer. When will you be done growing? With luck, never; to live is to grow. You have filled this place with splendid life. Now it's too familiar, so you have to break out of here to win room to advance. Walk ten thousand miles. Read ten thousand books. Keep going, and keep growing. Time to go. Go well.