A Novel Path
by Robert P. Barsanti
Ladies and Gentlemen, members of the class of 2011. You have achieved a great deal in your final year here. We have athletic champions, musical virtuosos, artistic geniuses and just great members of the community. This ceremony, this ritual is for you and for this day. But it is a very old ceremony. The gowns you are sweltering under right now date back into the middle ages when students would have to wear these gowns every day. Sometime around the Civil War, most academic institutions let those restrictions go and we only wear these robes now, at graduation.
The steps you will follow, the words we will say, the "Shake with the right, take with the left" are all steps that men and women have done, on this stage, for a hundred and fifty years. While you have been here, among us, you have walked in their steps, from classroom to dorm to playing field to cafeteria. After today, you will continue to walk in their steps, but not in their world.
Which is a shame. It would be useful to you, and to us, if you walked out of high school with the skills that will immediately bring big paychecks and the envy of your peers. The world changes too much for us to keep up with it. Schools and schoolteachers are conservative beasts; we teach what worked for us twenty or thirty years ago. This should explain why you had to make mix tapes, memorize phone numbers, and program a calculator.
It was that way for me as well. When I was in high school, I had to take a class in typing. I had to learn how to count the 33 lines on a sheet of paper, then mark off the lines where I would need to put footnotes. In another class, I learned to program computers in COBOL and make a computer game about landing a spaceship on the moon. I developed pictures in a darkroom, weighed my mail for the correct postage, and played records on the radio.
You are members of the broadband generation. Your pockets buzz with magic, your homes are filled with miracles. But the world will continue changing and someday, someone will laugh at the fact that you carried your phone with you in your pocket. One generation’s miracle is the next generation’s yard sale. That which cost you a thousand dollars yesterday will soon cost ten bucks. The only thing certain in this world is change. That which you are sure of today will surely disappear by tomorrow.
But the one other thing that will be constant in this world is you. The exterior world will have a thousand new miracles by the time you finish college, but the interior world will remain the same. The gowns that you wear aren’t the only things that have remained constant since the middle ages. We live the same lives they lived. We move away from home, we fall in love, we have children, they grow up. People are born, people die, and there is a lot of heartache somewhere in the middle. We walk in our parents’ footsteps as sure as they walked in their parents’. The paving changes, but the paths remain the same.
You will ask yourself the same questions that your parents and their parents asked themselves. Do I really want to do this work? Do I want to marry him? Will I make a good father? What should I do now that my parents are old? Have I wasted my life?
What we need, however, are experts. We may amuse ourselves with all sorts of glowing boxes and angry birds, but men and women will continue to muck about, babies will get made and the human heart will continue to be in conflict with itself.
Here, at last, your education can finally be of some help; we taught you how to read fiction. We have answers to those questions. The answer they wrote down are not in text books but in novels, short stories and plays. If you can keep reading, you can keep living.
The act of reading is a special act. It shuts out the rest of the world, whether it is screaming in the car seat or flashing out the window of the bus. When we read, we submerge into the world of the book. That life becomes our life. Physically, we remain the bags of meat that our children see and that need to be fed or scratched; but mentally and emotionally, we have slipped off the sofa, into the pages, and have arrived at on the Busted Flush, Slip F-18, Bahia Mar, Florida.
Movies, games, and TV shows are great, but they don’t demand the participation that novels do. A novel forces you to create and people a world. In this space between the words, these people have to shift, move, and dawdle. In bringing them to a creative life, we bring ourselves to life. Natty Bumpo looks a little like me, as does Brother Cadfael, Travis McGee, and even Harry Potter. In their trials, we face our own trials. They fall in love, they get abandoned, they have children, they get sick. At the end of the best of those works, when we have stayed up all night and turn the last page, we fall back into the world of refrigerators, phones, and toilets. And we cry. The best novels get our hearts and wring them wet. Videogames can’t do that.
Harry’s path is my path. As is Ishmael’s, Gatsby’s, and Tom Joad’s. You have the same path as well. What should I do? Can I get the past back? How do help my family? If you read, and if you read fiction, you can find the help that you are going to need in the blue-black of morning at the kitchen table.
Today, you sit out there with you friends. For the last time, you sit in a crowd of your peers. You have your toys, your clothes, your future. Somewhere out there in front of me, a text is being sent, a Facebook page is being updated, and a pig is dying at the feathers of an Angry Bird. A moment from now, you will swoop and dart to a corner of the world that needs you. My generation has left you a lot of work to do in Africa, in Afghanistan, in New York, and in New South Wales. Planes, Trains, and Automobiles will bring you to new challenges and new paychecks. But, you remain on a path. And that path takes you to the same places it always have. And you will find yourself sitting at the kitchen table of the soul at four o’clock in the morning.
We all have sat there. We all will sit there. The path travels there just as surely as it travels across this stage. Your education has prepared you for that cold morning. We may not have prepared you for the twitterverse or five dollar gasoline, but we have given you the tools for that inner struggle; for those long moments of joy and heartache that peak over the horizon before the dawn. There is coffee and there are tears and there is a phone that will ring or a letter or a car in the driveway. And, with you, there’s Atticus Finch and Jane Eyre and Dumbledore and the rest of the shadowy figures who have shown you a way forward.
Listen to them.
Read.
