The other frequently cited candidate for best graduation speech — one actually given at a college (Kenyon) by a writer (David Foster Wallace) — does something similar. With his trademark anti-ironic deployment of irony, Wallace annotates the clichés and commonplaces that any speaker in his position is likely to deploy. “This is a standard requirement of U.S. commencement speeches,” he observes, after relating a parable about fish: “the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories.”
His purpose, though, was not to defy the expectations of his listeners, but to give them what they came to hear. His speech, delivered in 2005 and published as a slim book called “This Is Water” after his death by suicide in 2008, plucks at one of the central contradictions facing modern college graduates. They are encouraged toward independent, adventurous, even rebellious individualism in a society built on standardization, conformity and boredom. Wallace doesn’t resolve this paradox so much as restate and refine it until he can find something to say that is both truthful and hopeful:
The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
This is not an unusual place for a commencement speech to arrive. Wallace’s is cherished because he managed to find an idiosyncratic, intellectually nimble and disarmingly sincere way to offer up platitudes. He comforted the graduates and allowed them to believe — or invited them to allow him to believe — that he was challenging them.
And that is the point of the ritual, an odd annual spectacle of tender and reciprocal generational condescension. The old pretend to have some wisdom for the young, and the young pretend to accept it.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve sampled several dozen commencement ceremonies, on video or via transcripts. An absurd undertaking, I know; those speeches are not meant for me. Their sameness, their rhetorical emptiness, is part of their value.
Ideological polarization is a powerful force in American life, but our shared commitment to banality may be stronger still. Congratulations and good luck.
