A Time to Move On
Anthony Esolen on Sending Our Children into Eternity (A Graduation Address)
Parents, was it so long ago that you could rock your child here to sleep in the crook of your arm? Can you remember when they had small voices, and could run about all day with a smudge on the nose and never notice?
In my office at school there’s a framed picture of which I am most fond. In my entirely impartial judgment, it is the loveliest baby picture that has ever been taken. It’s of Jessica at a few months, quite bald; but no doubt if she could have spoken then, she might have justly said, with the Bride in the Song of Songs, “I am bald, but I am beautiful!” She has a look in that picture—I am sure you have seen that look from your own children—a look as if she had recently arrived here from another world, and was not entirely sure of the goings on in this one.
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Anthony Esolen is a professor at Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts in Warner, New Hampshire, and the author of many books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House). He and his wife Debra publish a web magazine, Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com), on poetry, hymnody, language, classic films, and music. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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