LEWISTON – About 500 members of the Bates College Class of 2010 at the 2006 Convocation on Wednesday afternoon heard faculty member Robert Farnsworth advise them to embrace passion, discipline and generosity as guides for personal and academic success.

“You will spend the next four years discovering your deepest enthusiasms, and also finding ways of relating sometimes very disparate ideas and interests in your severally inclined minds,” Farnsworth said.

He said the “Three Lower-Case Virtues” of his talk’s title are meant “to suggest the effective value of understatement,” because, he asked, “who can take on the grandeur and gravity of the upper-case ones?”

Despite a light drizzle, Farnsworth’s address was delivered outdoors on the college’s historic quadrangle. Rain held off and the sun was breaking through at the end of the hour-long program.

Farnsworth listed passion as the first of his “lower-case, but nevertheless significant, virtues.”

He emphasized the importance of making and comprehending metaphors, telling the students that “life is not a matter of narrow expertise but a matter of connecting, of carrying across one form of meaning into another apparently unrelated context.”

Farnsworth said, “This is work that demands patient – but I want to emphasize passionate – attention, always seeking to be surprised, pleased and troubled, always seeking ways to connect knowing, believing, saying, acting.”

He told the students, “This passion for learning metaphor should be, I believe, the pith and the motive of all that you do here.” He added that it is work “that’s best done by hand, I think – by immersion, by travel, by direct human interaction, by means of first-hand rather than virtual contact.”

He went on to acknowledge that “even if our fingertips most often rest on keyboards now, Thoreau’s observation that we reason from our hands to our heads bears remembering.”

Farnsworth warned that “clever search engines may make many of our connections for us.” He urged the students to “make them by hand, on foot, by means of your senses, your listening and by your strict passionate attention to what happens.”

Farnsworth said the second lower-case virtue is discipline – in particular, disciplined thinking. He recalled his past summer of residence at famed poet Robert Frost’s former New Hampshire homestead, and he noted that he had “borrowed his skillet, and sat on his front porch, so why not borrow some of his ideas.”

At this point in his address, he quoted Frost’s essay, “Education By Poetry,” which said, “All metaphor breaks down somewhere. This is the beauty of it. It is touch and go with the metaphor, and until you have lived with it long enough, you don’t know when it is going.”

Farnsworth’s third lower-case virtue is generosity, which he said grows naturally out of the first two.

“Maybe it’s best to approach this virtue by observing that the world would be a more interesting and liveable place were we all to strive not to be fulfilled but, rather, fulfilling people,” he said. “It means teaching each other.”

A Lewiston resident, Farnsworth is a visiting assistant professor of English at Bates and a member of the faculty since 1990. His address begins a new tradition of faculty speakers which is intended to emphasize the enduring importance of the student-faculty relationship to a Bates education.