We create the Julian Clement Chase Prize to recognize and honor: appetite, boldness, the striving toward humane excellence, and the building of community.
The prize encourages and celebrates appetite.
Imagine: a very young man; a bicycle; and the freedom of the city.
Appetite is urgent hunger for the city, its mysteries, its undiscovered places.
It is also a responsiveness to the city. With each stride, each rotation of the bicycle wheel, each turn of the page of the archived manuscript, the venturer imbibes the city and, by some alchemy, conceives the city. And conceiving it, creates it, laying out the new vision in words.
Appetite can be instilled, and it is contagious.
Hungry for our city, we seek out others who can inform us. We hunger to see the city we love pictured back to us by other of the city’s lovers. Their unique visions nourish our own.
We don’t have near enough of these unique and intimate visions of Washington to share among us. You make a beginning.
This prize seeks out and honors boldness.
The purpose of life is to seek out the soul’s most meaningful challenge and to run straight at it hard as you can muster.
This may mean signing up with the United States Marines at just 18, and deploying to the very edge of the known world, and taking your own measure in physical combat.
It also means the boldness required to step out into the thin air of a new idea and to confront the loneliness of the struggle to wrestle that idea into communicable form, saying with Jacob to his Angel, “I will not let you go until you bless me.”
The best writing comes only where there is this boldness to commit the self. The best writing is known by the electric current running through it, current created by this bold exposure of self to subject. Revelation of the subject is contingent upon this revelation and commitment of self.
This is the boldness the prize seeks to recognize.
This prize recognizes striving toward humane excellence.
You go out into life.
You search out the craft, the discipline that will help you shape yourself.
You honor that discipline. You yearn after it, you immerse yourself in it.
You walk through fire for it – sometimes, literally. But always, soul’s fire.
Those around you, those close to you, watch with wonder and delight as your passion takes shape in you, blossoms, and begins to bear.
“Humane” excellence, because excellence has a context. We model here on a person of integrity and kindness.
Humane excellence is a higher form of excellence. It is seen in work that recognizes its connections to the community out of which it emerges; which gives voice to the values of that community and which engages in its struggles.
We intend that the prize seek out and honor this excellence.
This prize honors those who build community.
It is our intent to honor George Washington University with this prize.
The university, this university, is a place that the venturers, those just beginning the journey, aspire to.
Do you remember?
That moment when, with the first hazy vision of the excellence you yourself were capable of, a vision of what you yourself might be able to bring into The 3 World, you reached out, searching in the dark, for the guides and the community you had to have if you were ever to bring it to bear?
Alma mater: bounteous mother.
We are members of a community that others aspire to.
This is a place cherished in the imagination. This is a place looked to for soul’s salvation. This community is yearned for.
Those who participate here are entrusted with the dreams and ideals of these searchers. Responding to them, engaging with other searchers, we reach beyond ourselves, excel beyond ourselves.
We place the prize here at George Washington University to honor that community of spirit.
It is our intent to honor with this prize those within the University community who seek out the city of Washington.
What claim can we make to excellence as students except to the extent we engage the city we inhabit?
What is the significance of our skill and learning unless proved against our city?
We intend the prize to recognize and honor the work of members of the College who have looked around them and brought back fresh impressions, new learning, about our city and in so doing, weave university and city ever more securely together.
How are the streets of the city like the face of a boy? They map onto each other. They are recalled together, and made meaningful together. Each is essential to the meaning of the other.
So: appetite, boldness, the striving toward humane excellence, the building of community in university and city.
And what has this to do with Sgt. Chase?
This is not a “memorial” – the dank and funereal undertones of that.
In the days immediately after our family’s being confronted with the news that Chase, in Afghanistan, had completed his mission, his godfather Owen came up with the right word. The word is enact.
Having seen things of beauty and grace, of kindness and great promise, it is not for us to mourn, but to enact. It is for us to ensure that those fine things we witnessed are carried forward into the world.
We strive to enact them; through this prize we look to see them enacted. And we celebrate.
On behalf of our family, we are so very grateful to the University for making a place for us here.
Bell Julian Clement
Thursday, October 27, 2016