Speech for A High School Graduate

By Roger Rosenblatt

Your official commencement speaker tackles the big themes, tells you to abjure greed, to play fair, to serve your community, to know thyself. Your more personally devoted commencement speaker agrees with all that.

But he has special wishes for you too -- idiosyncratic, of course, what an educated daughter may have come to expect from an oddball. People always said that you resemble him.

What he wishes you first is a love of travel. Travel will hold you back from doting on your troubles, and once you've seen something of the world, you will recognize foreign places as instances of human range. The logic of Athens, the fortitude of London, the grace of Paris -- a city for every facet of the mind. He would have you connect travel with an appreciation of the past as well. In Jerusalem recently, he walked the Old City, brushing thousands of years of faith and murder. He would like you to see yourself as history, to wonder what you would have shouted, or at whom, as Jesus struggled up the Via Dolorosa. He hopes that you will husband your own past too. The past means possibility.

He also wishes you a love of animals, which you feel strongly already; he hopes that tenderness lasts and grows. Animals, too, draw people out of excessive self-interest, their existence a statement of need. A dog's eyes search your face for a mystery as deep as God, asking nothing and everything, the way that music operates. He hopes that you always love music, even the noisy boredom you clamp to your ears these days, while he harbors the prayer that in later years will follow Vivaldi and Bix Beiderbecke. If you learn to love jazz, you will have a perpetual source of joy at the ready. Jazz is serious joy, much like yourself.

For some reason, he has always favored culs-de-sac, so he hopes you live on one, someday, a neat little cutoff that surprises the city's motions with a pause. Trees on the street; he would like that for you, and low modest houses so the sky is evident. He hopes that your mornings are absolutely still except for birds, but that the evenings bulge with human outcry, families calling to one another in the darkening hours. He wishes you small particulars: a letter received indicating sudden affection, an exchange of wit with a total stranger, a moment of helpless hilarity, a flash of clarity, the anticipation of reading a detective thriller on a late afternoon in an electric storm.

He hopes that you learn to love work for its own sake. You have to be lucky for that (of course, he wishes you luck), and find a job that grows out of dreams. Something to do with helping others in your case, he should think, since he has seen your natural sympathy at work ever since your smallest childhood and has watched you reach toward your friends with straightforward kindness. Friends, he knows, you will have in abundance. He wishes them you.

He hopes that you will always play sports, just as ruthlessly as you play sports now. He hopes that you will always seek the company of books, including the trashy romances; that you will always be curious about the news, as long as you do not mistake the news for life. Believe it or not, he even hopes that you will always be crazy about clothes, particularly once you establish your own source of income -- fashion plate, charge plate. You seem to know the difference between vanity and style. On you high style looks good, kid.

Eccentrics: he hopes that you always have plenty of them about you, and few, if any, sound thinkers. Sound thinkers appear on television; sycophants award them prizes for sound thinking. Eccentrics have a sound of their own, like the wild Englishman Lord Berners, who invited a horse to tea, or less extravagantly, Bill Russell, who played basketball to meet only his own standards of excellence. Russell told his daughter that he never heard the boos of the crowd because he never heard the cheers -- no easy feat in an age pumped up by windbags and Kirkus Reviews. Your commencement speaker hopes that you will turn a deaf ear to empty praise as much as to careless blame, that you will scare yourself with your own severity.

Solitude he wishes you as well, but not solitude without a frame. Choose creative times and places to be by yourself. In museums, for instance, where you may confront Vermeer or Velazquez eye to eye. On summer Sundays, too, when you may be alone with the city in its most clear and wistful light: the mirrored buildings angled like kitchen knives, the Hopper stores dead quiet, the city's poor dazed like laundry hung out to dry on their fire escapes. For contrast, seek real country roads, tire-track roads straddling islands of weeds and rolling out into white haze. Such roads are not easy to find these days, but they exist, waiting to trace your solitude back into your memories, your dreams.

You never back down from a fight. Your commencement speaker cheers you for that, and hopes you do not weaken or think safe. Still, it helps to learn that some fights are too small for kindling, and if you must fight out of your weight class, always fight up. Hatred without a fight is self-consuming, and fighting without hatred is purposeless, so regretfully he wishes you some hatred too. But not much, and not to hold too long. There is always more cheapness in the world than you suspect, but less than you believe at the time it touches you. Just don't let the trash build up. And there is much to praise.

Such as your country, which, odd to admit, he hopes that you will always cherish, that you will acknowledge the immeasurable good in the place as well as the stupidities and wrongs. If public indignation over the scandals in Washington proves anything, it is that Americans remain innocent enough to believe in government by laws, and to be angered by deceit in power. He hopes that you retain and nurture that innocence, which is your country's saving grace.

In general, he wishes that you see the world generously, that you take note of and rail against all the Lebanons of violence, the Africas of want, but that you also rear back and bless the whole. This is not as hard to do as it may seem. Concentrate on details, and embrace what you fear. The trick is to love the world as it is, the way a father loves a daughter, helpless and attached as he watches her stretch, bloom, rise past his tutelage to her independent, miraculous ascendancy. But you must never let go entirely, as he will never let you go. You gave birth to each other, and you commence together. Goodbye, my girl.