I was talking on the phone to a colleague last month—I know what you’re thinking: “Where is he going with this?” But bear with me for a moment. He was complaining about something or other as professors do, while I was aimlessly walking around my study at home. I was looking at books and sorting papers while he rambled, when my eyes rested for a moment on a photograph of my late mother’s family—framed and hanging on the wall, among other pictures and tchotchkes accumulated over the years.

The photograph was taken in Lithuania in about 1914. There are my great-grandparents, looking like Sigmund Freud married Madame Curie. The children are easily recognized even at their young ages. There is my grandmother and her sister Gussie. Great Uncle Meyer is there, even as a child resembling what he would become in old age, a rather dim bulb usually wearing an old three-piece suit and smelling strongly of mothballs. Great Uncle Isadore looks like a confident little boy even before he came to America, learned English, changed his name to Howard, went to Harvard Law School and married the professor’s sister. 

We never liked him.

But hold on, who is this fifth child in the photograph? I had never noticed him before, even though that picture was on the table in the living room at the house I grew up in as well as on the aforementioned wall in my own house many years later. Historians are often accused of being visually incapacitated. We work with text and original written documents. Fine. But as it happens, I also have my family’s naturalization papers framed and hanging on the same wall about six feet from that mysterious photograph.

Sure enough, all of the children in the photo are listed, including that extra boy, apparently named Samuel. He looks to be about 15 years old in the picture, rather tall. Why is it that I never noticed him before? How come I never, ever, even heard his name mentioned? Who was he? What happened to him? And now, there is no one alive to ask: “and I only am escaped alone to tell thee,” as Melville quotes the Book of Job in “Moby Dick.”

The great American philosopher William James at the end of the 19th century invented the idea of a stream of consciousness, imagining life like being in a car while looking at the scenery from the window as you whiz by. 

“Consciousness,” he said, “does not appear chopped up in bits. Such words as ‘chain’ or ‘train’ do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing disjointed; it flows. A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind—without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos. Interest alone gives accent and emphasis, light and shade, background and foreground—intelligible perspective, in a word.”

That photograph on the wall of my study, and earlier in my parents’ house, never caught my attention until last month.

“To pay attention” in Hebrew is literally ”to put [your] heart [into it].” In English, you don’t put, you pay attention. Attention is a commodity. Every app and social medium wants your attention and cleverly gets you to pay. You probably remember “The Purloined Letter,” a famous story by Edgar Allan Poe, in which the French Police frantically search a house for a sensitive document but fail to notice it, until a clever amateur detective instantly finds it hiding unnoticed in plain sight. 

“There is a game of puzzles,” the detective explains, “which is played upon a map. One party playing requires another to find a given word—the name of town, river, state or empire—any word, in short, upon the motley and perplexed surface of the chart. A novice in the game generally seeks to embarrass his opponents by giving them the most minutely lettered names; but the adept selects such words as stretch, in large characters, from one end of the chart to the other. These, like the over-largely lettered signs and placards of the street, escape observation by being excessively obvious; and here the physical oversight is precisely analogous with the inapprehension by which the intellect suffers to pass unnoticed those considerations which are too obtrusively and too palpably self-evident. But this is a point, it appears, somewhat above or beneath the understanding of the [policeman] Prefect. He never once thought it probable, or possible, that the [criminal] Minister had deposited the letter immediately beneath the nose of the whole world, by way of best preventing any portion of that world from perceiving it.”

So too the notorious Irish playwright Oscar Wilde argued that: “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”

You brainiacs are not always clear about how we selected you to join Phi Beta Kappa. Well, we start with the students who have the top GPAs, of course. But then we apply an algorithm—nothing to do with Al Gore, don’t worry—to identify the graduating seniors (and a very few juniors) who have been paying attention to what a broad American liberal arts education has to offer.

I went to university in England. First-year undergraduates there are admitted already knowing what their single major will be … and that’s all you study. Yes, an English B.A. graduate will have knowledge about their particular field equivalent to a second or third-year American PhD student, but nothing else. I used to taunt my English student friends by asking them to identify places on the globe. You might say that it’s easy to confuse Crete with Cyprus … but Korea with Vietnam? Many hadn’t read a novel in years, or even glanced at a newspaper.

If you are here today, it means that while keeping your focus on your major or majors, you also paid attention to what a liberal arts education at Brandeis could offer. You may remember four-star Marine Corps General James Mattis, who was Secretary of Defense until the end of 2018, when he fell out with President Trump, resigned and only then was fired … surely the wrong way around, but never mind that. 

“If you haven’t read hundreds of books you are functionally illiterate,” Mattis insisted, “and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you.”

Jews give thanks to God for just about everything, even when it’s definitely a TMI situation. One of my favorite blessings is the one you are supposed to say when meeting a great scholar: thanking God “who gave His wisdom to flesh and blood.” My old mother was the queen of the cliché. She was born about a dozen years after that photograph on the wall of my study was taken. Her Yiddish version of the scholar’s blessing would be directed at me if I was spending too much time watching TV or reading “Mad Magazine”: “you can’t inherit learning,” which is to say, “do your homework, now.”

I usually drive home from Brandeis during rush hour, crawling along Waltham Main Street past our local version of the Stations of the Cross: “Wendy’s,” “Joseph’s (‘breakfast all day’),” “McDonalds,” “Wilson’s Diner” and “KFC.” Not many people know that Waltham Main Street is actually U.S. Route 20, the longest road in the United States of America. It begins at Kenmore Square in Boston and 3,365 miles later terminates at Newport, Oregon, only a mile from the Pacific Ocean. Maybe one day on the way to work I’ll just keep on keeping on and drive all the way to the coast.

But here’s the weird thing: three miles south of Route 20, a.k.a. Waltham Main Street, is the Mass Turnpike, the I-90, the longest interstate highway in the United States. It starts near Logan Airport, and 3100 miles later comes to a halt in Seattle. Right between those two long and majestic roads is the campus of Brandeis University. Now that can’t happen by chance. Some people believe that everything has a meaning. Like the song says, “life is a highway,” or at least a long U.S. Route. Maybe the message is that before you get on that highway of life, you need to prepare yourself for that journey, to get educated, to give yourself a life of the mind before you settle down to a career of whatever kind, traditional or not, which will dominate your focus and colonize your energies.

I had wanted to conclude my remarks by making that Route 20 / I-90 metaphor work. I thought I could bring in how the road on which Brandeis is situated between those highways is called South Street. Maybe come up with a slogan, something like, “when your life is going south, go to Brandeis” … but I don’t think that the fundraisers here would go for that. True, it would be a better motto than “truth even unto its innermost parts,” but not by much.

So instead, I want to leave you with the hope that as newly-minted members of the illustrious Phi Beta Kappa society, while moving forward in your lives and doing great things, that from time to time you will reflect a bit on how lucky you were to get that liberal arts education here. A Brandeis B.A. is a privilege you earned and it was an honor for us to teach you. So lose your focus now and again: it’s a Brandeis tradition!