Seniors Diego Jasson, Tim Kenny, and Oliver Nusbaum were inducted to the Cum Laude Society on Thursday, February 22.
Founded in 1906, the Cum Laude Society is dedicated to honoring scholastic achievement in secondary schools. In the years since its founding, Cum Laude has grown to 382 chapters.
The trio of senior boys joined last spring’s inductees and fellow classmates Gordon Kamer and Wesley Peisch.
John Pendergast, a Brunswick faculty member of 31 years, gave the keynote address to the audience of Upper School students and faculty.
Pendergast’s remarks centered on the concluding stanza of T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Four Quartets,” which he first encountered some 36 years ago, while researching his senior thesis at Harvard University.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Pendergast sat “clueless” as he read the words for the first time — they were too obscure, too difficult for him to understand.
Not until he completed the year-long process of researching and writing his 90-page thesis, an exploration into the complex origins of the Cold War, did he appreciate the stanza’s true value and significance.
“All the editing and typing were finished,” he recalled. “I placed all the pages in a special binder, made for these writing projects. I hadn’t eaten or slept for two days. I was exhausted and ready to crash. Only in that moment did I have a sense of finally arriving at my destination and knowing that place for the first time.
“Little did T. S. Eliot know that his poetry, discovered accidentally, would serve as a roadmap that would guide and inspire a struggling college writer to learn to love the journey as much as the destination, and to remember this great lesson for a lifetime.”