Occasionally a celebrity breaks through the usual pageant of banalities but in truth there are only a few like Vonnegut or Foster Wallace, and I make no pretensions at being any less forgettable than the next. Honestly, it’s best not to really be too well remembered; this isn’t a day to ignite controversy or draw attention away from the families gathered to celebrate.

You will notice here I only tangentially touched any political notes and studiously avoided anything that might bring unwanted notice---this farewell was an effort to admire the daring choice these young people made with their majors and less to imagine the brave all too new world with which they will contend.

In today’s NYTimes there is a genuinely terrifying article by a graduating Standford senior about how AI has reshaped his education. All I can say is that I found nothing about it surprising and everything about it revealing of our current age. It’s plain enough that’s there’s no going back, there’s no world ahead without AI and even less notion of what it will mean to when we are expected to make more connection with machines than with human beings.

Until these recent years, I thought I understood the role of educator was viable and, dare I say, even what it mean to be an educated person. But I no longer know where we are going, only that we cannot look back too long if we mean to have any say in the future. Perhaps its best that way, I mean it’s plain that I don’t represent the future.

But like all of us, I still hope to ask: who do we want to be? So that is what this valediction is about---the the courage and commitment it took for these students to study the ancient classics, archeology, and the religions of the world knowing full well that but that nothing about these subjects will land them a job or advance their prospects. Still, they all did something that’s difficult to do, they all put their curiosities and passions in front of these other, very serious concerns, and I hope I live to see at how their choice for the education we offered will inform their futures. Above all, I admire their character as much as their achievement, and I hope that is what I convey here.

&&&

The Valediction for the Graduating Class of Religion and Classics Majors, 2026

Congratulations graduates, it is truly your day. And you have earned it. Your family and friends celebrate you as we do. Graduating college is one of life’s big deals. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, including yourself.

Others have suffered comparably to our Rochester winters (aka “spring” semester). And undoubtedly they have done difficult things even if they have not had to determine the imparisyllabic nature of the Latin third declension, Greek irregular athematic μι-verbs that reduplicate in the present, or the required use of the dual in Sanskrit---nor have they had to answer to your question: what are you going to do with that, a major in Classics or Religion?

With your grammatical prowess you can scare your friends and impress the heathen. Don’t count on it to get you a date but you can certainly entertain yourself even if the job does not require a classical language. (Amuse thyself is Rule Zero.)

Roll it out for them, don’t be shy, you are not the dilettante, you’ve got the creds:

In Greek you can ask them,

Θα θέλατε πατάτες τηγανητές με αυτό

Tha thélate patátes tiganités me aftó?

In Sanskrit, taya sah alukan icchasi va?

तया सह alukan इच्छसि वा?

When they look at you befuddled puzzlement, you can render the question in English a an invitation to those you’re serving so ably:

Would you like fries with that?

You have long understood that job prospects in your given subject were more than a little suspect, but I assure you, you’ll never fail to bring others into gauzy mystification at your ability to apply your degree. Before I tell you why, recall what the Wizard told Scarecrow before his fateful departure from Oz, “Anybody can have a brain. That’s a very mediocre commodity... But they have one thing you haven’t got: A diploma!””

Your accomplishment will appear today on durable media---what used to be known as printed paper---and your University has undoubtedly already asked you for an alumni contribution. The latter is a sure sign that you have indeed graduated.

It’s not likely you came to Rochester to major or minor in Religion or Classics, who dreams of that? But “we are such stuff as dreams are made of” and by daring to dream, you have brought passion to purpose---and there is little as difficult we manifest in life, and you have already done that.

Since you have also had to explain yourself unlike your peers majoring in, say, accounting or business, you have demonstrably learned the difference between solving a problem and making an argument. I implore you too not to quarrel too much with yourself about your choices. Quarrels may be the outcome of well-founded disagreements, but they are not how we learn; they may prove meaningful but only when we dare to enter the contest of ideas in which we employ the powers of disproof and commit to offering uncertainty a place at the table. Instead of being quarrelsome make the case for being educated. You have learned not to allow the courage of your convictions to become the cowardice of certainties unchallenged.

As if you need more challenges in these challenging times, our future lies in your willingness to resist mere compliance or submission to those who would usurp your autonomy of mind and heart. Instead, be the alternative who declines violent reaction and invites the entanglement of honest conversation. This won’t be easy because it’s not the easy way, not always the simplest way, it will ask more of you than just what feels good, because what’s right won’t always feel good.

Few have learnt to revel in discomfort and most regard uncertainty to be but terror, without considering how our anxieties are fueled by a reluctance to engage life’s unavoidable complexities. We’d all prefer to keep it simple. We’ll dodge, bypass, or abstain because making the effort for deeper connection is always daunting; we then end up feeling lonelier, less fulfilled because that’s what happens when we go along to get along.

Making good trouble as John Lewis taught is never too soon or too late, speaking truth to power is how you will make a difference, and never default into complacency just because avoidance is the easier default. Isolation into self or tribe will prove costly, and it is the price paid by those who have not yet felt the urgency to turn towards the fire rather than run into safe redoubts.

This being educated will feel all rather counter-intuitive but now you know that soporific surrender is no choice at all. Your education has brought out the need to reject passivity in favor of receptivity; you are not by-standers but witnesses and participants in the creation of this world. You are creators because you translators, not only of words but of meaning for the human soul.

When the time comes---and it will---when four-wheel religion rolls your way and you see a baby carriage, a limousine, an ambulance, or a hearse, you will be the one people turn to. When things matter, you will have what you need and for others too.

Students of the Classics have known this need to create anew what has been true in every generation at least since Chapman’s translation of the Odessey in 1616. For those less familiar, there is a word in the very first line of Homer that compels re-translation, not because we don’t know what it means but because meaning made in the past must be re-made; for this is how we become educated to address the paradox of our human nature.

We are at once as we have always been. Humans gonna human. And at the same time, as our Buddhist friends remind us, we are creatures made of change, by our times, and in need of a narrative that speaks to the moment. We are simply human but never simple, be that in intention or task.

The Greek word describing Odysseus is polytropos, literally, poly meaning many/very/considerably/confoundedly and tropos, ways/form/style/manners/modes sometimes wise. Chapman translated the polytropos of the hero alliteratively as “many a way wound with his wisdom,” Cowper in 1791 “for shrewdness shamed and genius versatile,” Fitzgerald in 1961 “skilled in all the ways of contending.” My personal favorite: from Fagles in 1996 “ who declared him “of twists and turns,” and more recently by Emily Wilson, “complicated.”

Each has its charms, all justify their choices with interpretive erudition, and because of you, they will not be the last to attempt a translation of heroic experience. We may cry out, ‘please just tell me what it means’ but the very word polytropos tells us, well, it’s complicated, that our choices demand foresight, incite reflection, and will confound us in hindsight; nothing finishes the task of meaning but you will come to your own understanding and more likely than not it won’t be for the last time.

Things worth your time won’t really ever finish, time will run out on you while you are still giving matters the meaning they need now. You’ve learned not to separate your need for another translation from the pursuit of meaning. Life may insist that you to get it “right” but you will want more from your on-going odyssey. These are truths you’ve learned because you dared to study the classics, religions, and have learned to how to learn. You will never be less polytropos every time you ask what it means to be human.

Go and make the case that reaches people where they are to bring them to where you think they need to go; you won’t always be right but there’s no better feeling than offering a translation, making an argument that shows people how to change sides by discovering how they already siding.

Shouting across the river to the Zen master, “can you tell me, how do I get to the other side?” you may be confused when she replies, “why you are already on the other side!” It’s not the other side you are seeking so much as it is the connection with yourself. And if you start there, you’ll discover within yourself the need, the deep urgency to connect with others.

The journey towards meaning becomes the story of connection from within the complexity of twists and turns. Polytropos isn’t new, it’s that it’s always yours.

As you make the case for yourself, you will find arguing with yourself sometimes feels like madness but that too is the path to deeper connections, for it creates the opening to questions we have not considered and ideas we may otherwise choose not to hear.

Orwell tells us that argument is the art of telling someone what they don’t want to hear. It is an artistry to make such a telling because it makes translation a requirement for the conversation of connection. This is because truth is rarely revealed without discomforting yourself and others. The powerful may not welcome your effort; they too often require the company of sycophants. Learning to live with oneself in the polytropos is far more challenging than projecting vindictive insecurities or claiming never to be wrong. And you alone can never fix it.

Truth is as disruptive as it is revealing, rarely is it comforting unless we make the leap of Zen to embrace discomfort as comfort and imperfection as perfection.

But what you have learned in Classics and the study of Religion is that learning to learn is more arduous than claiming an opinion or asserting a “truth.” In some matters, like those pesky bits of grammatical complexity, problems can be solved. But all the rest demands a deeper dive into the polytropos, as Mendelsohn translated in 2025, “so many roundabout ways.”

Your courage to speak up won’t make you feel more secure; but it will reveal insecurity for all the values it presents, for worse and better. When you question beliefs, the bosses may be offended, but that’s why argument demands artistry. And such artistry is what you have learned and will continue to refine, not because you know the answers but because you have been steeped in asking.

Truth telling not only questions belief, it turns us into seekers. As Plato taught us, argument in the pursuit of truth is much like freedom and happiness: it is not without cost but indispensable to a well-lived life.

Students of religion know how religions prefer to indoctrinate rather than argue. We know how powerful religion can be, not because we’ve been encouraged to think or to seek, but principally to believe. This makes our studying religion all the more important and reveals too how the study of religion is so decidedly different than being religious.

We don’t study religions merely to consider their truth claims; we study religions because we know how much people want truth without wanting to hear any argument that challenges what they’ve been told to believe and more importantly have never learned to question. Our task is not to demean or blame people for who they are but instead try to understand the depth of their need. Everyone in their own polytropos needs your empathy, as you will need theirs.

When religions pretend to make things simple, we study that too but not because the answers are simple but rather because we know how hard it is to live in the questions. In this polytropos , this twisting and turning we have, at the very least, understood that some things you need to do, not because there are tangible rewards or certain outcomes but because you must, because the heart and mind will settle for no less.

As we say farewell today, our valediction is this: don’t make arguments that attempt to convert others to your views. Instead feel the ground beneath you move in ways that compels others to realize how they too must make concessions and refinements; argue to create the need to adjust opinions so that we don’t merely retreat into familiar atrophies of self-complaisance. Everyone leaves a little differently than they came. That’s success. To ask for more is to seek a conversion, an indoctrination, and that is something you learned about, but not the something you learned.

You’ll go make a living, you’ll do things you don’t want to do, sometimes to make money, but you’ll also have another kind of necessity. Not the sort that the world demands of you but the one that you have created in yourself.

As you transact to meet your material needs, recognize what your education has done to you, what it can do for you: you have transformed yourself, you have been transformed. Your (other) double major may transact more profitably in the world---no one ever asks why the accounting major majored in accounting. But yours has been a truly a transformative education, one that has demanded more than transactional abilities.

You have cultivated the ability to change, to connect, and to create your own argument: whatever you think you have learned, you have also chosen to be educated, to make the gift of being human an odyssey of heart and mind that will remake the world. Become that company you wish to keep.

Now go and find more good company, and go with this valediction and a last blessing from the Sanskrit:

Śaśvat purosuo’ vyuvāsa devyatho’ adyedam vyāvo maghonā |

Atho’ vyuchād-uttarānanu dyūnajarāmrtaa carati svadhābhiħ ||: (Rg Veda 1.113.3)

“Look well then to this day. For today, well lived will make every yesterday a dream of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope. Look well then to this day.”

Go make your case, polytropos. Visit with us again when you have the chance.

Aho’ Rajanaka,

I hope this finds you well. (This is the recorded version of today’s Newsletter, here in the text version also on Substack includes the schedule of our Zoom Sessions, including a warm affirmative for today’s Hanuman and the Greatness of the Shadow and tomorrow’s Sunday Mahabharata.) But on to more immediate matters at hand.

America’s bank robber not named Trump, the more romantic deception that is John Dillinger didn’t say this but Johnny Dep playing Dillinger did: “I like baseball, movies, good clothes, fast cars, whiskey, and you. What else you need to know?”

(Not endorsing this hat but it sure looks like Team Shiva, no?

Of course, I also can hear this line in the voice of none other than Shiva Nataraja. Shiva is talking to the ravishing and indefatigable Shakti. As we watch the scene play out, we naturally ask ourselves what is such a lovely soul as our resplendent g0ddess doing with a guy like that, you know, The One (albeit Without a Second) smeared in ashes, bedecked with serpents, hair twisted in knots, and otherwise being That Guy.

(We’ll conveniently bypass the best reasons we have for this otherwise unlikely liaison but suffice it to say, I recall what it’s like to show up for a date and have a father give me that look and we both know I deserve it.)

Surely our mythic conundrum warrants giving the entire matter of “That One” (tad ekam) of Rg Veda 10.129 another look. Who knows if That One knows from whence all this came, asks the Vedic Rsi Prajapati Parameshti, but we know that Shiva is never much given to doubt, much less self-doubt.

The poetic utterance itself is creation, and our puzzlement arises because creation may not be created at all, at which point That One is off the hook for knowing from whence. He participates in the problems we face and is not here to solve them. Is That One Shiva? Surely Shiva thinks so. Of course, Shiva may think he manages Team Shiva only to victory but the Game doesn’t actually work out that way.

It is unfortunately not in Shiva’s over-encoded masculine profile for him to recognize the shadow that is certainty nor to accept how one’s shadow overwrites the opportunity to address its unsavory implications. Shiva begins reality lamenting that it didn’t have to be this way, it coulda’ been betta’.

Now given the opportunity to do what’s better Shiva decides for alternative facts on the White House lawn, has his spokesperson and clever like a Fox (apologies to real foxes) State Media channel lie on his behalf. Shiva apparently needs to believe himself irrefragable and brooks no ambiguity. It’s not a happy thing to discover that your god has the tendencies of a narcissistic sociopath. We should only expect that of an American President.

Anyways, Shiva calls it, that’s the play. We live with the consequences because His call somehow stands. Thus, the universe is Shiva’s call---and solely his to make, he would like us to think---and the best our Devi can do is and acquiesce to the outcome.

In the story of the Dice Game we learn how Shiva can’t accept the truth right before his eyes; his denial in losing the game and being left with the extra piece in his hand, that he does indeed lose the “friendly” game to his beloved is beyond his capacities to appreciate. We all live with the residuals and ramifications of his dishonesty, just as we do our own.

But the point isn’t just that the god does the same stupit [sic] stuff we do, it’s that his stupit stuff’s got legs. We’re entangled in something far larger than ourselves and it’s not sin. It’s more about how the “divine” power itself is, umm, broken and that we’re not merely suffering our own failures but also those of our fearless leader---and that’s a problem, ‘cause some well-placed fear would have proven helpful to Shiva. When The Power reminds you that you are not The Power, you have to come to terms.

That’s at least a portion of the point of making this tale a cosmic drama, thus making it myth makes it applicable to all and every, such that authority and power we can’t control or even access reminds us how we the innocent will also be subject to its excrescence. Shiva makes no effort to learn from his mistake because he willfully denies making them. And that falsity becomes reality.

Making the problem mythic means that the lie isn’t merely a glitch in The Matrix, it’s now a feature of reality itself. Alas, we are living in a world broken by dissimulation that even when we know has happened makes us victims and from that state of affairs attempt to make whole.

The point of course is that the universe cannot be made whole again because Shiva is the one who broke it by denying what he did. We might expect to deal with such irremediable reality were it merely the work of an imbecilic president elected by those equally incapable of understanding their own moral turpitude and complicity in evil. That said, here we are, and the matter is cosmic, even if it is merely appearance, another ephemeral feature of conditionalities we would prefer to tell ourselves won’t apply in The Ultimate. Here we learn The Ultimate is as responsible for the problem as the rest of us and has no plans to fix it.

What I like best about this story is that it tells us first not to expect reality not to be broken in ways we can’t fix, that it’s not entirely our fault, and then, second, that we should do our best not to be like Shiva even when we know that we are nothing but Shiva. To wit, we’re all gonna do it again where “it” means that we’re going to deny reaity because we decide for the fiction rather than face the facts. Even if we know better, we’ll do that because it’s far harder than even Shiva ever imagined to be perfect---because there is no perfection. He still hasn’t quite grasped this point either.

With Shiva’s failure to see the truth, or perhaps even more importantly in his inadmission of error, refusal to revise his take, or bring some just remediation to an otherwise unjust, unwarranted, shabby, even iniquitous situation, he chooses instead for a peccant mendacity. We all know this is gonna make things worse. And so here we are. We live in a universe in which disingenuous perfidy has consequences tumbling into unreality that becomes far too real, doing far more harm than good. What can be done about that?

I would like to live in a world in which the umpires and the players are honest, particularly when everyone involved knows they blew the call. And I mean everyone knows and the blown call is beyond any, all, not even close, you gotta’ be kiddin’ me robbed in broad daylight. But Shiva the Umpire makes three calls all at once: "I call them as I see them,” "I call them as they are," and alas, "They ain't nothin' until I call 'em." Calling them as they are is of course where the discrepancy lies when we have to face what he thinks he saw. But even that isn’t as important as the fact that they aren’t nothin’ until called and that call changes the game.

This all happened on a microcosmic scale last night when the Mets suffered a triple play and everyone including both teams and the umpires knew that the umpires had blown the call. A blown triple play is rare in baseball in ways that America seems willing to make over and over again, say the 2016 election, two impeachments, how many failed prosecutions, and then 2024 re-election? Apparently, it ain’t over it’s over and we should wonder if we’ll ever get another chance.

The blown call for the Mets last night stood and while we don’t know if this blown call cost the Mets the game, it sure didn’t help. That other factors are in play and that the game’s outcome is likely more complex than any one call shouldn’t be ignored. Truth is that the Mets should have won despite the blown triple play and they didn’t---and this too sounds errily like where America may be going too. But there might yet be another moment, more complexity and a different outcome for us. We’ll see.

My point is that the universe appears to work the same way. We are living in a blown call, the Umpire knows it, we all know it, and as much the demons aka the other team benefiting from the blown call and unwilling even to mention the matter with real honesty are complicit in the lie because the truth would not benefit them. The outcome is a game lost to the truth but still a real loss, and this time we all know that it went the wrong way and there’s nothing to be done about it but live with the consequences.

The Met’s game is just baseball but we do learn from them to get up tomorrow and play another day, see if the outcomes are any more fair, accept that plenty of blown calls will happen again and won’t be admitted or somehow fixed. In this moment in which we witness and are subject to a unthriving American democracy overwritten by a leader whose choices, mistakes, and failures will impact the whole of the world and the course of human civilization, we find ourselves again in a situation not of helplessness but rather of having to deal with matters we can’t possibly control.

Can we avoid Shiva’s error for ourselves? The myth wants that question to remain a question. What we can do is attempt to survive the consequences of this wall to wall misegas and perhaps influence what we might not be able to change.

This power of influence is called abhicarana in Sanskrit. It doesn’t mean we can fix stuff. It admits to the reality we would prefer the fantasies of perfection rather than accept reality as broken. Abhicarana is the power we need to move along, somehow mitigate the irremediable facts, and build a bridge to better out of the rubble of truth. This isn’t nearly as bad as it sounds.

In fact, because the myth tells us that it’s the best we can do, there is cause to believe there can be some relief. After all, Shiva does dance and Shakti offers the scoundrel love, and they come to terms in the face of their mutual shadows. Maybe that’s what we must do too. Live with the shadows of truth that we don’t fix but somehow try to make better. There’s not going to be an upgrade to perfection. We going to have to live with ourselves.

Abhicarana---the power to bring agency, instigate movement, rouse the soul, urge ourselves on to change we can live with---this will be an important topic for our coming Rajanaka Summer Camp. It will also be a matter to address in our future conversations. When we can’t change a blown call, how do we go forward? The change we want may not be in the dice or within the powers of judgment of those making the calls (including ourselves for ourselves).

But we aren’t helpless and that too is part of the game. There is more game to come, another and another and if we are lucky life is a long season and the grind is part of the delight. Hot summer nights played under the lights and day games that follow though we are all exhausted. We need all learn better how the game is really played because we can continue to play the game, blown calls and all.For those who believe the rules can be made fair for all, I wish that too but that may not matter as much as the fact that calls will inevitably be blown---and that we’re not interested or maybe even capable of repairing the errors.

We’re going to have to deal with it all: the cheats, the liars, the outcome of the thrown dice, our frustrations with an imperfect world that seems to make Murphy an optimist. We’re going to have to learn what we can sway and juice, energize, animate, and induce. That power is called abhicarana. We’ll look for more mythos and another night game with the umpires to find out more about what this means and what it means to live a life with blown calls.

Saturday Hanuman link: https://rochester.zoom.us/j/95057662268

Sunday Mahabharata link: https://rochester.zoom.us/j/314987250

Downloadable Archive for Hanuman: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/fl8lkz3lv53lzmny28o55/AM5yQB5YSYn9WO2j7x3R4cU?rlkey=x604wds1ljxwyuhzvmhkjyozj&st=u0y07ce5&dl=0

Mahabharata Archive: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/wn3icbb418qcsrjqhk6ke/AGRZlDr4jD3CwECPGlLpoAc?rlkey=7otclsh4b0z7igpauy4y69e0t&st=dz9n4h7f&dl=0

If you access the Archives where you will find dozens of Sessions, please pay the tuition. It’s $15 for each Session to PayPal (svcourses@gmail.com) or Venmo (douglas-brooks-8, look for the corgi picture). Write to me if you would like to talk about this or anything else: douglas@rajanaka.com