2018年毕业典礼致辞

Rita Dove, DFA; May 20, 2018

Rita Dove—recipient of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in poetry and two-time U.S. Poet Laureate—delivered the address at Smith’s 140th Commencement ceremony, Sunday, May 20, 2018.

总统麦卡特尼, 临时教务长奥洛克, 尊敬的教师和校友, parents, 朋友们，尤其是你, the graduating class of 2018—congratulations to all: You made it!

生命的奥秘是什么? 也许就是这样 我们不知道. Perhaps the secret of happiness is that we recognize our ultimate ignorance and embrace it. That we cherish the journey life has to offer us, and try to keep that journey moving forward.

But here I am beginning to do what I intended to avoid—to pontificate with self-evident certitudes, 让我的声音在人群中被听到, where those big and beautiful words—the ones that we always think of as capitalized in our minds, 像“真理”这样的话, Honor, Happiness, Success, 最重要的是, 爱的三驾马车, Life, Death-well, such words might come off okay when thundered through a microphone, but they sound rather pompous when spoken face to face, 比如从父母传给后代. In fact, if I had spoken these words in conversation to my daughter, 她像你这么大的时候, 亲爱的毕业生, 她可能会直接嗤之以鼻, 或者至少不理睬我. 她这么做是对的. 她会说, “感情能不能, Mom," because that's what those words are—sentimental abstractions, 比生活更重要, teetering on the horizon like the wind-beaten letters of the Hollywood sign.

Because Life-不，让我改一下。 Living is specific, and those words encapsulate generalizations. Living is mired in details—the stain on your interview blouse, a missed phone call that might have made a difference in your career, and the Jeep running the red light that's clearly in the wrong, but you slam on the brakes anyway; the typo on the order form that ties up shipment, 桃子馅饼里的糖太多了. 那些夸夸其谈有什么用, 你有理由这样问, in a world where you can't even stop inhaling once every six or seven seconds?

所以我现在就不用了...至少现在还没有. I will simply start by telling you how I felt as a parent watching her own daughter triumphantly tossing that mortarboard high into the air: I felt inadequate. Yes, inadequate in my efforts as a mother to prepare my child for what might be waiting for her beyond graduation, this more or less formal divide between youth and adulthood. But then again, how could any parent have ever prepared you? They don't really 知道什么在等着你. 没人知道, 尤其是现在, in these precarious times where Truth has become a rather insecure commodity. And since none of us can truly and conclusively predict where exactly we are headed, 我们必须充分利用这段旅程. We must remind ourselves and each other that it matters how we conduct ourselves along the way—that we look at the landscape instead of barreling on by, that we have some laughs together rather than complain that our feet hurt—all the while acknowledging that there are no prepackaged, Twitter-size answers to the big questions about the Future.

The best two bits of advice I ever received were actually one and the same. As a teenager I spent weekends with grandmother, who was slowly going blind. Her favorite word of wisdom was: "As long as you've done your best 从内到外亲爱的，你会没事的.换句话说, if you've done your homework—not just enough to “get over” but really done the best you know you're capable of—if you've attended to your inner health as well as your exterior requirements, 那你就没事了.

我父母的说法类似，但又不同. They also encouraged me and my siblings to always do the very best we knew we could do—not just what was expected of us. They would frown upon us scraping by on assignments, merely fulfilling minimum requirements. Their argument sharpened my grandmother's advice and put it into a social, 或者我们应该说是社会背景, meaning that we as African-Americans would have to be twice as good as the next candidate for any job, so we might as well get into gear and condition ourselves accordingly. No matter what grades we brought home, their first question was, “Did you do your very best?”

当你离开这个机构时, the first things you may remember about your college days are the friends and parties, all-nighters made bearable with Chinese take-out and strong coffee. Maybe you'll remember the cell biology professor who gave a mid-term exam where all the abstract formulas had been converted to “real” things, such as: Your spaceship won't take off from Pluto because it's encrusted with barnacles; how do you go about determining what protein makes the glue that the barnacles are using, 这样你就可以移除它们? And you thought: How dare she confuse your carefully crammed head with annoying real life scenarios? Later, you'll convince yourself that you remember next to nothing from the classes you took during your freshman and sophomore years. Or you'll condemn the three rewrites of your senior project as an unnecessarily sadistic exercise.

Those, at least, were some of the memories I harbored when I graduated from college so long ago that I could be your grandmother. But I also remember contentious debates about glaring racial inequalities and sex discrimination, 罗伊诉韦德案的胜利喜悦, which the Supreme Court decided that very year when I received my bachelor’s degree, I remember going out into the streets to demonstrate against the Vietnam War madness, and I remember better than I’d like to the corruption and inhumanity of an administration whose viciousness and duplicity found a partial comeuppance in Watergate, though the disillusion it engendered in us permeated our bright dreams of democracy—sound familiar?

Each generation has its own demons and battles to fight. You will look back on Friday teas and dorm room all-nighters and remember the spontaneous debates over climate change, 婚姻平等, 我们国家根深蒂固的枪支文化, 而不是好战的警察, over children deported by authorities for whom compassion is an alien concept, 因为选举出了大错, 因为绝望的民众对阿片类药物上瘾, over the pervasive macho menace brought to light by MeToo.

然而，生活在华尔兹或绊倒, and soon you’ll begin to miss those days when you could ask your professors for the answers to whatever intrigued you. 你如何有尊严地坚持你的梦想? How do you know when you should listen to others and when to follow your own hunches? How can you remain connected to that innermost spiritual hunger while negotiating the necessary commerce of living?

Quite a while ago when I was Poet Laureate of the United States, I received a letter from a young mother who pleaded that “poetry needs to be taught to very young children before they get the idea that they can’t write it, 我不想写出来, 或者不明白……”她总结道：“在某种意义上, 诗歌使语言成为你自己的语言.我喜欢这句话. 这关系到我们所有人, after all—because the mind is informed by the spirit of play, and every discipline is peppered with vivid terminology: Fractal geometry has dragon curves and Packed Swiss Cheese cosmologies. There are lady’s slippers in botany and onomatopoeic bushwhackers. 足球有边后卫, buttonhooks and coffin corners; there are doglegs on golf courses and butterfly valves in automobiles. And when there are no words for what we need, we make up new ones: Drama queen. Soul patch. 遗愿清单. Google.

记住这首儿歌的开头：

如果全世界都是纸，
整个海都是墨水；
如果所有的树都是面包和奶酪，
我们应该喝点什么?

This is the danger in the freedom you’re just graduating to: If you allow your picture of the world to shrink to the perimeters of your job or your field of graduate study; if, overwhelmed by the sheer weight of information available and overcome by the onslaught of falsehoods that masquerade as truths, you begin to sort and file rather than access and ponder…you just might end up experiencing the world as ink and paper riddled with faulty equations, 你会发现你的灵魂渴死了.

在古罗马，每个公民都有一个天才. 天才是一个人的个人精神, which came to each and every one at birth; it represented the fullness of one’s potential powers. This genius, then, was considered a birthright, but it needed to be nourished in order to survive. Today, 在我们这个自恋的时代, the birthday child expects gifts to shower down upon her; but the ancient Roman was expected to make a sacrifice to his or her genius. If one served one's genius well during one's lifetime, the genius became a household god, called a lars在某人死后. If, however, 一个人忽视了自己的潜力, 这个天才变成了一个幽灵, 一个折磨活人的讨厌鬼.

Here at Smith, you have received a topnotch liberal education. That is, you have not only been well trained in your individual fields, but also been exposed to a range of other disciplines, encouraged to explore new ideas based on a solid core of knowledge geared to help you cope with the boundless changes that you will need to confront in our rapidly vacillating civilization. (I wish I could say “accelerating civilization,” but I'm no longer sure that Forward is the direction in which our society is going at the moment.)

无论你最终成为政治家还是画家, a novelist or a neurologist—this you all have in common: You have learned how to pursue thoughts and ideas, 希望你已经爱上了这种追求.

我最喜欢的另一首鹅妈妈的押韵诗是：

这是天国的钥匙。
在那个王国里有一座城，
在那座城市里有一个小镇，
在那个镇上有一条街，
那条街上有一条小巷，
那条巷子里有一所房子，
在那所房子里有一个房间在等着
在那个房间里有一张床，
那张床上有一个篮子，
一篮花.

篮子里的花，
篮子在床上，
床在房间里，
在房子的房间里，
杂草丛生的院子里的房子，
院子里蜿蜒的小巷，
在宽阔的街道小巷，
在高镇的街道上，
城市中的小镇，
王国中的城市：
这是天国的钥匙.

I love this verse because it reminds me that all ideas large and grand have sprung their roots from very small seeds. In a way, it is a description of the path to wisdom—start with the thing you know; then, 当你冒险进入这个世界, taking the road of education into ever broader avenues of possibility, 把你在学习过程中所学到的应用起来, never forgetting that the key to the kingdom of knowledge is linked to curiosity and appreciation.

With these Commencement exercises you are making your departure a public act. You have been in incubation but now you breathe on your own—no rarefied ether, 而是生命的浓浓气息. 你必须自己产生热量. 这个任务是个谜. The door leads out and away; as the word Commencement implies, it is a door into a new beginning.

虽然听起来很奇怪, one of the things you might most likely miss is that there are no more class assignments to fulfill. Oh yes! Because an assignment can force you to go where you would have been too lazy or to apprehensive to venture before. Even rote exercises follow this mantra: Athletes know that if they don't keep up training, 肌肉会变硬, eventually, atrophy. 歌手们谈到支持声音, which they do through frequent and sustained practice, strengthening the muscle of the diaphragm so that that clear and beautiful sound you're hearing is being uplifted by years of exercise.

So here is one last assignment for you—a bit of homework, the bonus question on the exam you've already passed with flying colors. I challenge you to tweet me your very own graduation poem—your feelings, your fears and hopes and—well whatever details you intend to carry with you on the way to the future. 在推特上告诉我#gradpoem. In return, I’ll leave you with one of my own poems, called “黎明的重新审视”:

黎明的重新审视

想象你醒来
有了第二次机会：冠蓝鸦
兜售他漂亮的商品
橡树依然挺立，枝叶繁茂
辉煌的阴影. 如果你不回头，

未来永远不会发生.
在阳光下升起是多么美好，
在饼干的香味中
烤架上有鸡蛋和香肠.
整个天空都是你的

在上面写字，吹开
转到空白页. Come on,
快点! 你永远不会知道
谁在下面煎鸡蛋呢？
如果你不站起来看看.

别忘了把你的诗在#gradpoem上发给我. Now go on and celebrate—congratulations, class of 2018!