I have to confess to all of you, Madame President, Board of Trustees,
members of the faculty, relatives, friends, students. I have had
some conflicted feelings about accepting this invitation to deliver
the Commencement Address to Wellesley’s Class of 2004. My initial
response, of course, was glee, a very strong sense of pleasure at,
you know, participating personally and formally in the rites of an
institution with this reputation: 125 years of history in women’s
education, an enviable rostrum of graduates, its commitment sustained
over the years in making a difference in the world, and its successful
resistance to challenges that women’s colleges have faced from
the beginning and throughout the years. An extraordinary record—and
I was delighted to be asked to participate and return to this campus.
But my second response was not so happy. I was very anxious about
having to figure out something to say to this particular class at this
particular time, because I was really troubled by what could be honestly
said in 2004 to over 500 elegantly educated women, or to relatives
and friends who are relieved at this moment, but hopeful as well as
apprehensive. And to a college faculty and administration dedicated
to leadership and knowledgeable about what that entails. Well, of course,
I could be sure of the relatives and the friends, just tell them that
youth is always insulting because it manages generation after generation
not only to survive and replace us, but to triumph over us completely.
And I would remind the faculty and the administration of what each
knows: that the work they do takes second place to nothing, nothing
at all, and that theirs is a first order profession. Now, of course
to the graduates I could make reference to things appropriate to your
situations--the future, the past, the present, but most of all happiness.
Regarding the future, I would have to rest my case on some bromide,
like the future is yours for the taking. Or, that it’s
whatever you make of it. But the fact is it is not yours for
the taking. And it is not whatever you make of it. The future
is also what other
people make of it, how other people will participate in it and impinge
on your experience of it.
But I’m not going to talk anymore about the future because
I’m
hesitant to describe or predict because I’m not even certain
that it exists. That is to say, I’m not certain that somehow,
perhaps, a burgeoning ménage a trois of political interests,
corporate interests and military interests will not prevail and literally
annihilate an inhabitable, humane future. Because I don’t think
we can any longer rely on separation of powers, free speech, religious
tolerance or unchallengeable civil liberties as a matter of course.
That is, not while finite humans in the flux of time make decisions
of infinite damage. Not while finite humans make infinite claims of
virtue and unassailable power that are beyond their competence, if
not their reach. So, no happy talk about the future.
Maybe the past offers a better venue. You already share an old tradition
of an uncompromisingly intellectual women’s college, and that
past and that tradition is important to both understand and preserve.
It’s worthy of reverence and transmission. You’ve already
learned some strategies for appraising the historical and economical
and cultural past that you have inherited. But this is not a speech
focusing on the splendor of the national past that you are also inheriting.
You will detect a faint note of apology in the descriptions of this
bequest, a kind of sorrow that accompanies it, because it’s
not good enough for you. Because the past is already in debt to the
mismanaged
present. And besides, contrary to what you may have heard or learned,
the past is not done and it is not over, it’s still in process,
which is another way of saying that when it’s critiqued, analyzed,
it yields new information about itself. The past is already changing
as it is being reexamined, as it is being listened to for deeper resonances.
Actually it can be more liberating than any imagined future if you
are willing to identify its evasions, its distortions, its lies, and
are willing to unleash
its secrets.
But again, it seemed inappropriate, very inappropriate, for me to
delve into a past for people who are in the process of making one,
forging
their own, so I consider this focusing on your responsibility as graduates—graduates
of this institution and citizens of the world—and to tell you
once again, repeat to you the admonition, a sort of a wish,
that you go out and save the world. That is to suggest to you that
with energy and right thinking you can certainly improve, certainly
you might even rescue it. Now that’s a heavy burden to be placed
on one generation by a member of another generation because it's a
responsibility we ought to share, not save the world, but simply to
love it, meaning don’t hurt it, it’s already beaten and
scoured and gasping for breath. Don’t hurt it or enable others
who do and will. Know and identify the predators waving flags made
of dollar bills. They will say anything, promise anything, do everything
to turn the planet into a casino where only the house cards can win—little
people with finite lives love to play games with the infinite. But
I thought better of that, selecting your responsibilities for you.
If I did that, I would assume your education had been in vain and that
you were incapable of deciding for yourself what your responsibilities
should be.
So, I’m left with the last thing that I sort of ignored as a
topic. Happiness. I’m sure you have been told that this is the
best time of your life. It may be. But if it’s true that this
is the best time of your life, if you have already lived or are now
living at this age the best years, or if the next few turn out to be
the best, then you have my condolences. Because you'll want to remain
here, stuck in these so-called best years, never maturing, wanting
only to look, to feel and be the adolescent that whole industries are
devoted to forcing you to remain.
One more flawless article of clothing, one more elaborate toy, the
truly perfect diet, the harmless but necessary drug, the almost final
elective surgery, the ultimate cosmetic—all designed to maintain
hunger for stasis. While children are being eroticized into adults,
adults are being exoticized into eternal juvenilia. I know that happiness
has been the real, if covert, target of your labors here, your choices
of companions, of the profession that you will enter. You deserve
it and I want you to gain it, everybody should. But if that’s
all you have on your mind, then you do have my sympathy, and if these
are
indeed the best years of your life, you do have my condolences because
there is nothing, believe me, more satisfying, more gratifying than
true adulthood. The adulthood that is the span of life before you.
The process of becoming one is not inevitable. Its achievement is a
difficult beauty, an intensely hard won glory, which commercial forces
and cultural vapidity should not be permitted to deprive you of.
Now, if I can’t talk inspiringly and hopefully about the future
or the past or the present and your responsibility to the present or
happiness, you might be wondering why I showed up. If things are that
dour, that tentative, you might ask yourself, what’s this got
to do with me? What about my life? I didn’t ask to be born, as
they say. I beg to differ with you. Yes, you did! In fact, you insisted
upon it. It’s too easy, you know, too ordinary, too common to
not be born. So your presence here on Earth is a very large part your
doing.
So it is up to the self, that self that insisted on life that I want
to speak to now—candidly—and tell you the truth that I
have not really been clearheaded about, the world I have described
to you,
the
one you are inheriting. All my ruminations about the future, the past,
responsibility, happiness are really about my generation, not yours.
My generation's profligacy, my generation's heedlessness and denial,
its frail ego that required endless draughts of power juice and repeated
images of weakness in others in order to prop up our own illusion of
strength, more and more self congratulation while we sell you more
and more games and images of death as entertainment. In short, the
palm I was reading wasn’t yours, it was the splayed hand of my
own generation and I know no generation has a complete grip on the
imagination and work of the next one, not mine and not your parents’,
not if you refuse to let it be so. You don’t have to accept those
media labels. You need not settle for any defining category. You don’t
have to be merely a taxpayer or a red state or a blue state or a consumer
or a minority or a majority.
Of course, you’re general, but you’re also specific. A
citizen and a person, and the person you are is like nobody else on
the planet. Nobody has the exact memory that you have. What is now
known is not all what you are capable of knowing. You are your own
stories and therefore free to imagine and experience what it means
to be human without wealth. What it feels like to be human without
domination over others, without reckless arrogance, without fear of
others unlike you, without rotating, rehearsing and reinventing the
hatreds you learned in the sandbox. And although you don’t have
complete control over the narrative (no author does, I can tell you),
you could nevertheless create it.
Although you will never fully know or successfully manipulate the
characters who surface or disrupt your plot, you can respect the ones
who do by paying them close attention and doing them justice. The theme
you choose may change or simply elude you, but being your own story
means you can always choose the tone. It also means that you can invent
the language to say who you are and what you mean. But then, I am a
teller of stories and therefore an optimist, a believer in the ethical
bend of the human heart, a believer in the mind's disgust with fraud
and its appetite for truth, a believer in the ferocity of beauty. So,
from my point of view, which is that of a storyteller, I see your life
as already artful, waiting, just waiting and ready for you to make
it art.
Thank you.
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