It’s our graduation ceremony next week. It’s reminded me of this great passage from Peter Davidson’s collection of essays, Distance and Memory. Davidson has written a couple of wonderful cultural histories-cum-lyric essays on the idea of north and on twilight. Until fairly recently he was a professor at the University of Aberdeen. This is what he writes, in an essay called ‘Summer’, about the high-camp of the graduation ceremony rituals there and everywhere:

‘The academic year moves to a graceful close, the students pack and go. Suddenly there are empty car parks and the high street of the Old Town is silent, but for the garden fountain opposite the crown spire of the chapel. Then, graduations, with the proper Scottish flaring of scarlet gowns against grey stone. It strikes me (as it has probably struck every Latin-literate academic in northern Europe one summer or another) that the point of the Gaudeamus Igitur, locally “the Gaudie”, which our students sing as we come in, is that it says two completely different things to two different audiences. To the students … it says things are good now, and the future uncertain:

Gaudeamus igitur.

Iuvenes dum sumus.

The suspended rhyme is held to the end of the verse: Nos habebit humus – the grave will get us.

To the professors coming in as they sing the last verse,

Vivat academia!

Vivant professors!

Vivat membrum quodlibet;

Vivant membra quaeliebet ;

Semper sint in flore

it turns year by year into a memento mori. It is the university that will stand and flourish, while, like all the generations of Principals, Humanists, Civilists, Mediciners, Regents, Magistrands, Tertians, Semis, Bajans and Sacrists, we ourselves will follow all those whose signatures are on the flyleaves of the books in the old library, to the grave. The young are singing truer than they know.’

Happy graduation day, everyone …