Be Bold! Be Bold! Be Bold!
This is my first commencement, and I think it’s a wonderful college
to be having it. I liked hearing a woman chaplain give in invocation; I
admire your distinguished and extraordinary President; and I agree
heartily with the content of the two speeches, especially their upfront
feminist sentiments, just delivered by two graduating seniors…
Graduation is one of the few genuine rites of passage left in our
society. You are, individually and collectively, passing symbolically
from one place to another, from an old to a new status. And, like all
such rites, it is both retrospective and prospective. You are graduating
(or being graduated) from college, which is the end of something. But
the ceremony we are participating in is called commencement.
That necessarily seasonal, minor literary form called the
“commencement address” also faces in two directions. It usually starts
with an analysis of the society or the era—appropriately pessimistic. It
generally concludes with a heavy dose of exhortation, in which the
young graduates, after having been suitably alarmed, are nevertheless
urged to be of good cheer as they go forth into the arena of struggle
that is your life, and this world.
As a writer, therefore fascinated by genres, as well as an American,
and therefore prone to sermonizing, I shall respect the tradition. The
times we live in are indeed alarming. It is a time of the most appalling
escalation of violence—violence to the environment, both “nature” and
“culture;” violence to all living beings. A time in which an ideology of
exterminism, institutionalized in the nuclear arms race, has gained
increasing credence—threatening life itself. It is also a time of a
vertiginous drop in cultural standards, of virulent
anti-intellectualism, and of triumphant mediocrity—a mediocrity that
characterizes the educational system that you have just passed through,
or has passed you through (for all the efforts and good will of many of
your teachers). Trivializing standards, using as their justification the
ideal of democracy, have made the very idea of a serious humanist
education virtually unintelligible to most people. A vast system of
mental lobotomization has been put into operation that sets the
standards to which all accede. (I am speaking, of course, of American
television.)
A singularly foolish and incompetent president sets the tone for an
extraordinary regression in public ideals, strengthening apathy and a
sense of hopelessness before the self-destructive course of foreign
policy and the arms race. The best critical impulses in our society—such
as that which has give rise to feminist consciousness—are under vicious
attack. An increasing propaganda for conformism in morals and in art
instructs us that originality and individuality will always be defeated,
and simply do not pay. There is a strengthening of the power of censors
within and without. The constraints which govern us in this society
have little in common with the grim normalcy of totalitarian societies.
Our society does not censor as totalitarian societies do; on the
contrary, our society promises liberty, self-fulfillment, and
self-expression. But many features of our so-called culture have as
their goal and result the reduction of our mental life, or our mental
operation; and this is precisely, I would argue, what censorship is
about. Censorship does not exist in order to keep secrets. The secrets
that censors target, such as sex, are usually open secrets. Censorship
is a formal principle. It has no predetermined subject. It exists in
order to promote and defend power against the challenge of
individuality. It exists in order to maintain optimism, to suppress
pessimism; that is to give pessimism—which often means truthfulness—a
bad conscience.
Of course, the grim assessments of our era—such as I have just
outlined—can themselves become a species of conformity. But only if we
have too simple a sense of our lives. Whenever we speak, we tend to make
matters sound simpler than they are, and than we know they are.
I have said that this rite of passage—commencement—is one that faces
in two directions. Your old status and your new status. The past and the
present. The present and the future. But I would urge that it is not
just a description of today’s exercises but a model for how you should
try to live. As if you were always graduating, ending, and,
simultaneously, always beginning. And your sense of the world, and of
the large amount of life before you, also should face in two directions.
It is true that the macro-news—the news about the world—is bad.
It
is also true that your news may not be bad; indeed, that you have a duty
not to let it be as bad for you. Perhaps the main point of knowing a
rule is to be an exception to it.
If your liberal arts education has meant anything, it has given you
some notions of a critical opposition to the way things are (and are
generally defined—for example, for you as women.) This attitude of
opposition is not justified as a strategy, as a means to an end, a way
of changing the world. It is, rather, the best way of being in the
world.
As individuals we are never outside of some system which bestows
significance. But we can become aware that our lives consist: both
really and potentially, of many systems. That we always have choices,
options—and that it is a failure of imagination (or fantasy) not to
perceive this. The large system of significance in which we live is
called “culture.” In that sense, no one is without a culture. But in a
stricter sense, culture is not a given but an achievement, that we have
to work at all our lives. Far from being given, culture is something we
have to strive to protect against all incursions. Culture is the
opposite of provinciality—the provinciality of the intellect, and the
provinciality of the heart. (Far from being merely national, or local,
it is properly international.) The highest culture is self-critical and
makes us suspicious and critical of state power.
The liberal arts education you have received is not a luxury, as some
of you may think, but a necessity- and more. For there is an intrinsic
connection between a liberal arts education, by which I mean an
education in the traditions and methods of “high” culture, and the very
existence of liberty. Liberty means the right to diversity, to
difference; the right to difficulty. It is the study of history and
philosophy- it’s the love of arts, in all the non-linear complexity of
their traditions- that teaches us that.
Perhaps the most useful suggestion I can make on the day when most of
you are ceasing to be students, is that you go on being students- for
the rest of your lives. Don’t move to a mental slum.
If you go on being students, if you do not consider you have
graduated and that your schooling is done, perhaps you can at least save
yourselves and thereby make a space for others, in which they too can
resist the pressures to conformity, the public drone and the inner and
outer censors- such as those who tell you that you belong to a
“post-feminist generation.”
There are other counsels that might be useful. But if I had to
restrict myself to just one, I would want to praise the virtue of
obstinacy. (This is something anyone who is a writer knows a good deal
about: for without obstinacy, or stubbornness, or tenacity, or
pigheadedness, nothing gets written.) For whatever you want to do, if it
has any quality or distinction or creativity- or, as women, if it
defies sexual stereotypes- you can be sure that most people and many
institutions will be devoted to encouraging you not to do it. If you
want to do creative work- if you want, even though women, to lead
unservile lives- there will be many obstacles. And you will have many
excuses. These do not mitigate the failure. “Whatever prevents you from
doing your work,” a writer once observed, “has become your work.”
All counsels of courage usually contain, at the end, a counsel of
prudence. In Spenser’s The Faerie Queen, Book III, there is a place
called the Castle of Busyrane, on whose outer gate is written BE BOLD,
and on the second gate, BE BOLD, BE BOLD, and on the inner iron door, BE
NOT TOO BOLD.
This is not the advice I am giving. I would urge you to be as
imprudent as you dare. BE BOLD, BE BOLD, BE BOLD. Keep on reading.
(Poetry. And novels from 1700 to 1940.) Lay off the television. And,
remember when you hear yourself saying one day that you don’t have time
any more to read- or listen to music, or look at painting, or go to the
movies, or do whatever feeds you head now- then you’re getting old. That
means they got to you, after all.
I wish you Love. Courage. And Fantasy.
Susan Sontag, Commencement speech, Wellesley College (1983)
