Commencement

The Saturday of Memorial Day weekend has always been the date of the BAC graduation.  This year, we have the largest number of graduates of any year in the college's—about 140, give or take a last-minute breakdown.  Nora gets to speak for a couple of minutes as she congratulates her students, the new graduates of Interior Design.  She's on the couch in the other room, writing her remarks as I write this.

There's a common trope in commencement speeches in which a speaker will remind the assembled that the word "commencement" means beginnings, not endings.  But as Nora's own term as head of the ID school comes to a close on Tuesday, I'm thinking seriously about commencement.  What will she launch now that this is concluding?  I have a thought that it'll look a little different than her work of recent years past; I feel a new direction.

In exactly four weeks, give or take a couple of hours, Nora and I and all of you will have our own hillside commencement, the official launch of us.  Unofficially, of course, we've been an "us" for several years, but this is a different "us," a new direction as well.

I'm reminded of the Kenyon College commencement speech by David Foster Wallace, posthumously published as a short book, This Is Water.

Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom.  The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation.  This kind of freedom has much to recommend it.  But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying.  The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other peple and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.  That is real freedom.  That is being taught how to think.  The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race—the constant, gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

Nora has just finished and read to me her own, briefer, remarks for today.  I'll put them up here later.  But we all have, indeed, some infinite thing that deserves our attention, our awareness, our discipline, our effort, and our care.  And that is what we should commence to do.