Top Three Commencement Speeches

[wordsrmylife]

Because it is commencement season and because I teach seniors, the things they are told has been on my mind lately. The funny thing is, I don't remember what the speakers said at either my husband's commencement in 1978 or mine in 1979, although I do remember who they were: Doris Kearns Goodwin, a Colby grad whose biography of Lyndon Johnson had been making a splash, and Robert E.L. Strider III, the outgoing college president. I do seem to have some sense that RELS, as he was known to us, said something about joining us in a new adventure and wishing us well in it, but that's about it.

On the other hand, these three commencement speeches resonate with me and all three say things I want to tell those seniors.

• "I hope you fail." Failing means you have tried, you have reached for something just beyond your grasp. But, as Samuel Beckett, that bucket of cheerfulness, said, "Try again. Fail better." If you fail and still want it, you have to be willing to try, to work, to dedicate yourself to whatever it is you want to do, until someday you won't fail. This isn't supposed to be easy. It's supposed to be worth doing. If you think it is worth doing, stick with it.
• "Hold onto your art. It may be a lifeline." There have been days when the only thing that got me through was the idea that "nothing is wasted on an artist." Even when I didn't have the emotional wherewithal to "make good art," I knew that whatever the experience, it was making me the person who could, just maybe, make good art, could try something she wasn't at all sure about and find that other people thought it was worth recognizing.
• "Choose how you will approach life and the world." A friend of mine, who worked with John Cage, said that one thing he learned from Cage was that you can't control the world, you can only control your own reactions to the world.

But here those speeches are, in their own words.

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(Here's the text of David Foster Wallace's speech.)