Bill Watterson’s Commencement Address
Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes gave a commencement speech at Kenyon College in 1990. The number of topics Watterson addresses is striking. A few that caught my attention:
- Unsustainability and moral bankruptcy of US business
- The story we tell ourselves about ourselves shapes our lives (narrative therapy)
- Media overload
- Materialism
Here’s one quote I liked:
We’re not really taught how to recreate constructively. We need to do more than find diversions; we need to restore and expand ourselves. Our idea of relaxing is all too often to plop down in front of the television set and let its pandering idiocy liquefy our brains. Shutting off the thought process is not rejuvenating; the mind is like a car battery—it recharges by running.
I also liked this:
You may be surprised to find how quickly you start to see your politics and religion become matters of habit rather than thought and inquiry.
Don’t go on autopilot, don’t coast, don’t put a box around ideas you have and petrify your beliefs. Finally:
Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement.
Oh, I almost forgot: you may recognize the name Kenyon College from another famous address: the singular David Foster Wallace spoke at their 2005 commencement.
Their selection committee must be well-connected.
While skimming it to find the passage I always remember, I again realized that Wallace’s narrative is ostensibly rambling but in actuality, tightly woven. I have trouble writing about him, because I’m sure my prose is exactly the type that would cause him to tear his hair out. So, I’ll try to get to the crux of the speech with a quote, but I feel a little guilty snipping a piece out to reproduce here. All I can hear in my head is DFW: “You’ll find me a truculent editee.” Anyways. Here:
But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.