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Susan Sontag
Commencement Speech 1983
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.
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