Carpe what now? Commencement speeches shift from the lofty to the skeptical.
COMMENCEMENT SPEECHES DIVERT FROM LOFTY-MINDED, LEAN TOWARD SKEPTICISM
In days of yore, graduation speeches were fiery or throat-clenched battle cries, highly reliant on one or more familiar themes. Be bold, these call to arms exhorted: Dare to tilt at windmills with your own handmade pole vault. Question everything, they counselled — light a fire underneath your inner Ralph Nader. Make the world a better place, they goaded — you’ ll be too tired to do so once your newborn is powerblasting your shoulder with boysenberry-hued vomit.
But today’s commencement speeches, as evidenced by a new book (Assume the Worst: The Graduation Speech You’ll Never Hear) by novelist Carl Hiaasen and cartoonist Roz Chast, and another (In Conclusion, Don’t Worry About It) by actress Lauren Graham, are less fife-anddrum than plaintive bagpipe. Inspiration is superseded by skepticism or a shiny decal that might read: “You Are Enough.”
‘LOWER YOUR EXPECTATIONS’
In his offering, Hiaasen advises graduates that “lowering your expectations will inoculate you against serial disappointments,” then debunking four “lame platitudes” (“Live each day as if it’s your last,” “Try to find goodness in everyone you meet,” etc.) that clog the graduation and self-help industries. The result is a Dave Barry-esque shuffle of loony sarcasm.
Hiaasen applies pragmatic scorn to “If you set your mind to it, you can be anything you want to be,” pointing out that if Bill Gates had tried to be a professional bronco rider, “he wouldn’t have made it past his first rodeo ... and Microsoft would today be a brand of absorbent underwear.” Meanwhile, Chast breaks up the text with her signature blend of bug-eyed bedragglement.
Graham’s book, like most in this genre, is a speech she actually delivered. Last year the “Gilmore Girls” star told the graduates of Langley High in her hometown McLean, Va., that receiving her Langley diploma in 1984 felt like “an empty victory”: the pleather folder given to her was empty because Graham had never returned a copy of Robinson Crusoe to the school’s library.
‘TAKE A CHILL PILL’
Extrapolating from this deflating moment, Graham’s book is a showbiz veteran’s 45-pagelong “Take a chill pill” that champions self-acceptance over splashy achievement. It’s what a Buddhist monk might write had his moment of enlightenment occurred when he was cast as Townsperson No. 3 in a high school production of “L’il Abner.”
Whence this penchant for resignation and passive selfacceptance amongst commencement speakers? While an armchair sociologist might be tempted to scapegoat the current political climate or lagging attention spans in the face of spoken rhetoric, it’s probably more useful to acknowledge the huge success of similarly skeptical and unbreathy commencement speeches of the recent past.
In 2012, schoolteacher David McCullough Jr. told the graduating class of Wellesley High School near Boston: “You are not special. You are not exceptional,” setting off a firestorm of media attention; his 2014 book-length expansion of the speech became an international best-seller. In 2013, when the transcript of George Saunders’ convocation speech at Syracuse University was put on The New York Times’ website, it and its galvanizing humility (“What I regret most in life are failures of kindness”) were soon shared more than a million times, and published as a book a year later.
The climax of the TV titan Shonda Rhimes’ best-selling memoir from last year, The Year of Yes, recounts how Rhimes — an introvert who once hired a publicist to avoid public appearances — summoned the courage to give the 2014 commencement speech at Dartmouth. Her speech was full of rue: “Shonda, how do you do it all? The answer is: I don’t. Whenever you see me succeeding in one area of my life, that almost certainly means I am failing in another area of my life. If I am killing it on a Scandal script for work, I am probably missing bath and story time at home. If I am at home sewing my kids’ Halloween costumes, I’m probably blowing off a rewrite I was supposed to turn in.”
Indeed, the contemporary commencement speech sometimes posits failure as an end in itself, and not necessarily as a slough from which to rebound. In 2008, J.K. Rowling praised failure in her Harvard commencement address, several years after Steve Jobs told Stanford’s graduating class that death is “the most wonderful invention of life,” because it “purges the system of these old models that are obsolete.”
‘BE WILLING TO FAIL’
But poet Claudia Rankine outdid Rowling last year at Wesleyan: “What I wish for you is that you will pursue your unknown and unrealized imagined possibilities, even though the imagined/unimagined resides with such proximity to failure. To pursue something because it matters to you, to your moral expectations for the world; to pursue something because the way it occurs now is, to be blunt, unjust, to pursue and invest in change despite not having the power to implement it directly, is to be willing to fail. Then success is beside the point.”
None of these pronouncements would matter much were it not for their target: graduation speeches, and their subsequent book iterations, derive their piquancy from the fact that they’re aimed at people entering adulthood. The stakes are high. Lives might be changed here. Indeed, it’s not difficult to read Saunders’ Congratulations, by the Way or David Foster Wallace’s This Is Water and be reduced to muffled sobbing.
Moreover, a published speech’s brevity, not to mention its distilled, lapidary quality, can prove powerful: one Amazon customer review of the book version of Mary Karr’s 2015 Syracuse University speech declared that “This tiny, itsy bitty, so tiny, two pages really, little ‘book’ is lovely,” and then heaped on the encomium “sublime.”
By the same token, the books in this category that don’t get under their readers’ skin can seem all the more mercenary for being aimed at a population strapped with college loans and a lot of uncertainty about the future. Here, the books’ meagre word count is a liability.
Not all current commencement books, it should be noted, use their skepticism or plaintive bagpiping as a dodge or a rationale for self-inventorying. Case in point: Last year’s Lift Off, by Donovan Livingston. Declared “powerful” by Hillary Clinton and “inspired” by Justin Timberlake, the book is the convocation speech that Livingston, a poet and educator, gave last year to the Harvard Graduate School of Education. It argues that education can become an equalizer only once we acknowledge racial divides and the legacy of slavery. Livingston encouraged his audience:
“As leaders, rather than raising your voices over the rustling of our chains take them off.
Uncuff us.”
If these young peoples’ implied circumstances have been reduced, he suggests, their resultant actions needn’t be. “Sky is not the limit,” he concluded. “It is only the beginning.” Then: “Lift off.”
In the end, maybe it’s only fitting that graduation speeches now sometimes come in a new flavour (bitter melon). Graduating seniors, in the eyes of these texts, are neither lumps of clay nor young warriors equipped with lightsabres. As young folk take their seats and wonder what sort of medicine they’ll be dispensed of — wide-eyed cheerleading? grim vérité? — they are getting a powerful preview of the suspense and open-endedness that their next few years will bring them.
Welcome to life.
WHAT I REGRET MOST IN LIFE ARE FAILURES OF KINDNESS.