David Adams Richards is a longtime friend and lifetime member of the WFNB. We were pleased and honoured to present our inaugural Legacy Award to him during the New Brunswick Book Awards on June 1. Our legacy award honours individuals whose lifelong dedication have left a lasting impact on the writing community in New Brunswick.

David could not attend the New Brunswick Book Awards because he was preparing to received an honorary doctorate from McGill University in Montreal the following day. His sister, the Honourable Judge Mary Jane Richards attended to receive the award on his behalf.

See below his convocation address:

 “Good morning, everyone. I’m not going to take too much of your time. As I was telling the people downstairs, this is the only way I could get into McGill. [Laughter.]

Chancellor, President and vice chancellor…friends, family…and most of all the graduating class of 2025. I have a bit of a strange topic today, but I think it’s rather important one. I want to sincerely congratulate every graduate and wish them well on their life’s journey, for this is an achievement both remarkable and fulfilling, and no matter what you as individuals decide to do, it is here today something to be extremely proud of.

So I wish to talk today about the sanctification of each of us as individuals, and how that sanctification so often benefits the world we live in. You see, when I was much younger, I hitchhiked from my home in Newcastle, Miramichi, to a literary group in Fredericton with poems I had written stuffed into my pockets, hoping for one poem to someday be published.

Often I was alone on that highway in the winter with no car or truck in sight, and thinking I had been forsaken, but of course that was not true. That was long ago and almost another world, but in so many ways the same things are manifest [in us] today and will always be.

For I’ve come to realize that struggle for the benefit of others – for goodness, kindness and simplicity, as Leo Tolstoy has reminded us, is always in its own right a sanctification, and when seen is always recognized as something akin to joy.

I often think that what all of us admires is a duty not to fine things, although I hope we will all have those in our lives, but it is the intimate and unchangeable courage of the average human heart. It is that courage that is the real blessing.

So I come to my topic in the few minutes I have from two statements by that very troubled prophet born two centuries ago – Fyodor Dostoevsky, who said, “Beauty will save the world,” and “Christ and the devil fight for the souls of men, and the weapon they use is beauty.”

Nor am I ever demanding that you believe in either Christ or the devil. I am asking you, however, to reflect upon Dostoevsky’s statement. So let us view one kind of beauty as filled with adornment, power and prestige, the beauty that is created by worldly desires. Know that this beauty is never in itself wrong and we can desire it and have it. And I know we will have it. But it is seductive, and it can take us away from our true selves if we are not careful.

However, the beauty that continually counters it, Christ’s beauty, is filled with something entirely different, even completely opposite. It is the beauty of sacrifice. Dostoevsky tells us this other beauty, this beauty of kindness, simplicity and truth, is the one that actually points the way for us in this world. It is why Dostoevsky said, “beauty will save the world.”

It is seen in a worker taking on a double shift because a child needs clothes, seen in those who are fighting fires to save other people’s homes, seen in friends of mine who chopped through the ice in Quebec during the ice storm to rescue those they did not know. It is part of the most formative and glorious seed in every one of us. All of us possess this beauty, and at our best, know we have it. No book can teach us this, but the books we have read and struggled over most often help us realize why it is so needed in the world.

Perhaps in the end it is the only beauty that actually means anything. We stumble toward it all our lives, hoping we can measure up to it actually. We write about it and long for it, beyond wealth or position. No great novel is great without recognizing sacrifices of pinnacle beauty. No person can ever become great without sacrificing in some ways themselves for others.

So there was a man, a Mr. Guggenheim – famous, rich and quite spoiled, yet on the Titanic, when his valet came to him saying he had procured him a spot for him on a lifeboat, he answered, “No Guggenheim will be so cowardly as to take the place from a lady.” Then wearing his tuxedo, poured he and his valet a glass of brandy, and did not go.

And what does that mean for a Mr. Guggenheim who could not command a position on a lifeboat during the last night of his life, and what does that mean for us?

Why, you see, everything.

It is part of the greatest blessing given to mankind. No, it’s not an easy lesson, but let me tell you all of us will learn that this is a true lesson, in either big ways or small.

So too there was a Mr. Astor and his wife. They were rich enough to buy thirty-five Titanics, who gave their spot to forlorn children and Mrs. Astor’s maid. Perhaps this is not a moment to remember that beauty will save the world and that “Christ and the devil fight for the souls of man and the weapon they use is beauty.” Ah, but in another, it is part of the greatest acknowledgement to us as human beings. Beyond anything else, goodness, kindness and simplicity will in the end make us totally free.

And in a moment too, it might make us realize what Percy Bysshe Shelley understood:  that all great empires return to sand, but the human heart does not. Let us strive in our own way and in our own lives for that human heart, to achieve it and to recognize it in those who might not have the position or the wealth we will require. Some of the finest actions I have seen have been in men and women who have very little. It is what every writer who I have ever admired, every historical figure I’ve ever respected had: the ability to realize and the secret is if it wasn’t important, courage and sacrifice would never be remembered today.

For my friend working a double shift underground to buy his daughter a dress, is where that beauty always has been and always will reside. It might take some time to realize it, ah, but once we do, we can never dismiss it. It is why Dostoevsky is still important, and why our learning and our teaching should always include prophets like him.

Christ and the devil fight for the souls of man, and the weapon they use is beauty. This should actually uplift us all to do our work as selflessly as we can. That, as human beings, God calls upon us not to be comfortable, but to be great. To realize, as Tolstoy did, that there is no greatness or goodness, simplicity or truth in action…to strive for that in spite of it all. God bless you in all of your lives and all your ambitions that you hold dear. Thank you very much.”

David Adams Richards

McGill University spring convocation address

June 2, 2025