I love a good graduation speech. Especially Neil Gaiman’s “Make Good Art” and George Saunders’s words on kindness. Read them some time, if you haven’t.
I’m fortunate to have in my possession the original copy of a pretty masterful graduation speech. Last summer, I was sitting at my mom’s cluttered computer desk and unearthed a rumpled old document—ten pages of size-14 double-spaced Times New Roman, stapled together and titled “Ceremony.”
Reading it, I realized it was the transcript of a speech I’d heard at a small ceremony leading up to my graduation from Northwestern University in 2005. My dad had apparently walked up to the speaker afterward and asked for an emailed copy, or so my mom explained. The speaker just gave him the papers right out of his hand.
That speaker was Gary Morson, a beloved professor of Russian literature whose classes always seemed to fill up before I could claim a spot or never meshed with my schedule. My doctor friend and lawyer husband both recall his Intro to Russian Lit course as a favorite. I’ve always regretted that I, an English major, never experienced it.
But other than the professor’s name, nothing about the speech was familiar to me. Eight years had passed since I’d heard it, and I’ve never been a great listener to begin with. But it obviously made an impression on my father.
There are times in your life when it feels as if the universe is sending you a message—as if someone or something is reaching through the plane to give you a quick shake. I never took Professor Morson’s class, but the summer I found his speech, I was reading Anna Karenina for the first time, just because. And I missed my dad terribly.
An excerpt from Morson’s speech:
Perhaps Tolstoy’s most famous line is the first sentence of Anna Karenina: all happy families resemble each other; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. What does this much-quoted line actually mean? When Tolstoy was writing the opening of his novel, his notebooks record a French proverb: Happy people have no history. He understood that to mean: a life filled with the sort of events that make a life dramatic and narratable—a life like Anna Karenina’s—is a life badly lived; whereas happy people live so that one couldn’t tell their story. What would one say: they didn’t fight again today? They had dinner, talked, kissed the children goodnight, and went to bed?
The more a life resembles a docudrama, the less substance it has. Live so there is nothing to report in an obituary or carve on a tombstone. Maybe the best epitaph would read: he lived right, so there is nothing to say about him. I like the one Dorothy Parker composed: Pardon my dust.
There are moments in life when even very successful people come to feel, beyond all consolation, that life is entirely pointless. All is vanity, will be consumed by death, disappears like patterns in sand; there is nothing to have faith in and nothing that really matters. Such moments are common in Tolstoy. His characters want an answer to their question: what makes a life meaningful? They want a formula, a set of rules to guide them . . .
When such despairing questions arise, you should take them as symptoms. They are probably saying: you have not lived right. You must change your life. And what you have lived badly is the hundred thousand ordinary moments of life. It is not some big decision you made wrong, but a thousand small ones. It is the process of making those decisions you must change.
If the problem is ethical, you must start to do right to people right in front of you, not seek to change the world. Indeed, the only way to change the world effectively is to do the small things right, which concatenate to encourage others to do other small things right. Unfortunately, in our time, most people have believed the opposite—that goodness can only be achieved by total upheaval, by the imposition of some ideology. And so the saviors become the killers. A saint should always be assumed guilty until proven innocent. A noble cause should be held suspect if you feel superior for supporting it. If you think of the twentieth century, you can come up with a rule-of-thumb: the most suffering is caused by those who think they can abolish it forever. Consider Stalin or Hitler or Pol Pot or Mao. And the “root cause” of the greatest suffering is the belief in a root cause.
There is no single root cause. There are, as in a battle described by Tolstoy, a hundred million causes irreducible to any single law. Life is filled with the messy and contingent. In such a situation, in a world of radical uncertainty, it is the small acts of goodness and love that matter most. Love thy neighbor, not thy party. If you find yourself wondering how anyone could vote differently from you, take that as a sign that you have failed in sympathy, imagination, and open-mindedness.
Goodness ramifies. In Karamazov, Father Zosima tells the other monks not to think of holiness in terms of martyrdom, but as smiling to the person whom one passes on the street: for such a small act may change another mood and that person’s next actions may be better, and so on. You never see the end of it, but you may have faith in it. Cast a little bread upon the waters.
The closing lines of George Eliot’s Middlemarch describe how the heroine, who had longed and failed to do good in grand ways like those in the Lives of the Saints, learns to do good in small ways that matter much more:
Her finely-touched spirit still had its fine issues, though they were not widely visible . . . But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.