From a speech given before the Wellesley Speech Society on March 29, 2008 Boyhood is the ultimate fraternity, a rite of passage all men hold in common. While this time period is individually experienced in nearly infinite permutations, with each future man dealing with his own unique set of struggles and opportunities, I am convinced that among the foundational features of boyhood is exploration.
Nearly every boy seizes upon and perhaps even creates opportunity to explore; to stretch the boundaries of his knowledge, familiarity, strength, will, being, and so forth. Take, for instance, the boy who rides his bike two houses beyond his parents’ boundary. When next he sets out upon his trusty steed, his mother reminds him of the limit, to which he replies that his sphere of influence has grown. Thus a boy begins by exploring a neighborhood and continues with exploring his city.
Look at Huckleberry Finn, the closest thing we of this holy fraternity hold as a sacred text. Tom and Huck set out along the mighty Mississippi River in search of adventure and fortune, plotting their course along what was then the greatest frontier known to modern man. These first among boys stopped at nothing to further the bounds of their own world over the course of their golden summer, much to the benefit of all who have had the privilege to follow.
My own childhood was filled with exploration. Living in a narrow valley, my brothers and I would dedicate ourselves on a warm afternoon to finding a new place or to understanding a known place even better. After half a decade of life in the country, we had expanded our own frontier from the small plot comprised of our house and yard to territory within a four-mile radius—the size of many large city centers in today’s world.
As I have put but a very little distance between myself and my boyhood, I have come to realize that this innate bent upon exploration in boys turns into something greater in men: conquest. Just as a boy seeks to explore the territory around him, a mark of the man is that he makes that territory a part of his dominion, whether it be physical land or the realm of business, of politics, or of society.
Over the course of years, a man will take on much weight outside of himself in the form of fiscal and familial responsibilities. The time of his childhood exploration then becomes ever more critical, for under this weight a man can no longer afford to expand his boundaries, he must tend to the land that is already his. Thus it is that the boy determines the measure of the man; a man can conquer only as much as his early shadow has long ago explored.
