Ophelia
Dahl's
Commencement Address
to the Wellesley College Class of 2006
 Thank
you, President Chapman Walsh, trustees, faculty, staff, parents,
family
and loved ones.
Thank you, Sophie, for your wise words and for bringing the memory
of your mother here for us on this significant day. I would say
that it is clear that the qualities you attribute to your mother,
namely her confidence, poise and intelligence, have evidently seeped
into you in important ways. Allow us to be proud of you on her
behalf.
What a magnificent day!
Students, Class of 2006: a.k.a. the purple pranksters. Let’s just say you have made your mark, painted
the town, left your prints all over this campus, and we’ll
leave it at that. I’m not going to bring up any unpleasantness
in front of your parents. There’ll be plenty of time for
that when they get the bill in July.
Davis Scholars: I am so pleased to be here as one of you. Thank
you for giving me this to wear. I am filled with admiration for
you and for this college for embracing the notion that education
for women is often put on hold for important reasons and that age
should not bar you from returning.
It is a real pleasure to be here, and I am honored and delighted
to have been invited to address you.
The view from here is
lovely—a sea of intelligent faces.
I feel enveloped by what I can only describe as a force, a force
that is your parents’ and loved ones’ collective pride.
If you could only see their expressions, their beams—enough
to light up this majestic tent. Take it from me; they are thrilled
to be finished with the tuition – I mean, they are thrilled
to be part of this important and well-earned rite of passage.
I have a close friend
whose mother returned to finish her degree while in her 40s at
a similar Davis Scholar type of program at
an only slightly inferior well-known women’s college about
63 miles west of here. She had spent 20 years raising a family
and earning a living as a cashier in a supermarket before reapplying
to finish her degree. She filled in the lengthy questionnaire and
when, at the end of the application, it asked her somewhat intimidatingly
to list any awards or honors she’d received in her lifetime.
She wrote simply the names of her six children: Katy, PJ, Jimmy,
Jeffrey, Jennifer and Peggy. You are already all the prizes your
parents’ could ask for. In fact, as one famous graduation
speaker noted, now would be the most opportune moment to ask for
money.
Part of my excitement
in addressing you all is that yours has been a class particularly
connected to major political events—both
here and abroad. I know that you all arrived with the echo of 9/11
still audible. The first anniversary of that defining moment was
commemorated while you were still finding your own foothold on
this stunning campus. Each year you have witnessed major disasters
unfold and you have wrestled with profound political issues, including
a presidential election that left many in the world reeling.
And in the midst of
all this, Hollywood came here to make a movie about a young white
chick going to college in the 50s. We live
in a topsy-turvy times indeed. But if you thought Mona Lisa
Smile was tough on you—have you heard about the movie sequel they
will making here next September? Trading Places 3. The basic storyline
is that Larry Summers and Diana Chapman Walsh will exchange jobs
for a year. It’s a docudrama—sort of Educating
Rita mixed with Lethal Weapon II. They will be holding auditions for
science majors to play extras this fall.
But maybe you have seen in some of these events over the last
four years the connections between your lives and those in the
news: families facing the horrors in Darfur, those broken spirits
in Abu Ghraib, or the bodies floating in the rising waters of New
Orleans. In 2003, you watched the United States invade Iraq, and
I imagine you must have felt deeply troubled at times, knowing
that the news reports showing distant flashes on satellite maps
represented bombs exploding in cities, cities filled with human
beings.
Perhaps you know people
who had gone to fight in this war, and you worried about their
mission and their safety. I’ll bet
you wondered too about the Iraqi families and civilians caught
in the midst of the relentless bombing and violence. Some of you
must have doubted the sanity of such a war and questioned the connections
between Iraq and other countries in which we wage a furious struggle
against those we call our enemies. That leaves us thinking about
how to resist the persistent call to divide ourselves into us and
them. And how might these turbulent times that we live in shape
our future? Of course there have been centuries of troubles, wars,
violence and terrible battles. You’ll see behind you generations
of brave people who waded through a mire of injustice and violence
to shape a better future and chose to fight passionately for causes
they believe in.
Adam Hochschild writes
beautifully about one such cause: the abolitionist movement,
in his book, Bury the Chains. He states compellingly
that “the abolitionists succeeded where others failed because
they mastered one challenge that faces anyone who cares about social
and economic justice: drawing connections between the near and
the distant.” Linking our own lives and fates with those
we can’t see will, I believe, be the key to a decent and
shared future.
What will this require? A bit of imagination, some knowledge,
and access to the Internet. All things I know you have in abundance.
It helps, too, if you have a proclivity for compassion (which will
be fueled by your imagination), a good sense of humor (fueled by
your imagination), and love (fueled by other things much too complicated
to go into without alcohol). As discerning Wellesley graduates
you will, I think, find it difficult to travel very far in the
world without taking into account the painful fact that some of
our own abundant good fortune rests on the misfortune of others.
With so many
calamitous events all available for us to witness in vivid color,
in both
real time and slow motion on TV or the
Internet, with so much exposure to the suffering of others and
the plethora of ways in which the world is crying out for improvement—it
must be overwhelming to look at your life and the span in front
of you, with all those choices and wonder how to find your place.
Especially while people are telling you, and maybe even you yourself,
that somehow it is your obligation to fix the world.
I hope I can offer you
a more manageable approach, one that seems to have worked well
for me. It is called the “don’t
try to plan too far ahead” method. It has a catchy acronym:
DttPtFAM. DUPFTAM.
 I
had no idea what I would do before I went off on my own adventure
at roughly
your
age. Encouraged by my dad to see another side of
the world, I traveled from the quiet English countryside to Haiti,
a place so unfamiliar to me I had to look up its exact location
in an encyclopedia. For the first six months, I lived in an orphanage
and joined an ophthalmic organization whose mission, broadly stated,
was to take care of patients with glaucoma. I knew that I had nothing
much to offer except goodwill—no real skills and yet, though
difficult to describe, I was getting a training in something. It
was subtle perhaps and had to do with the fact that I was taking
everything in, things that leave an indelible mark. I watched as
old women, their eyes milky from cataracts, came to the clinics
clutching a filthy old rag and inside a few coins to try to pay
for their care. I watched carefully as parents tried to talk their
way into clinics with sick children, and I didn’t stop watching
when they were turned away for their inability to pay.
I spent six months in
this way, taking in new sights—and
a new level of suffering—for it was my introduction to abject
poverty and with it came an unfamiliar feeling: hopelessness. I
wanted to do something to help, but I was paralyzed in the face
of such profound need. I remember at the end of my first trip I
stood on top of the hill in Port au Prince and looked down at the
sprawling slums that covered the grimy city. I longed to go home
to England and forget this corner of the world. Yet I knew too
that it would be impossible, impossible to erase the memory of
all I had seen and of all the people who had taken me in. But I
remained plagued by a sense of how little I could do for any one
person in a country like Haiti.
I turned to my great
friend, Paul Farmer (I hope you all find a friend like him),
who was 23, and I said that I didn’t
think it will be possible to change anything, to make a dent in
this sort of problem. And he said, “Why don’t we focus
on one thing? Let’s concentrate on one small area, on a community,
not the country, certainly not the world.” And so we did
without thinking too much about what might lie ahead—in other
words without much of a plan, but utilizing the talent, goodwill
and generosity of other people, working as a team (some of whom
are here today). We had one specific goal: to bring healthcare
to a small area of rural Haiti, to a group that had lost their
land and their livelihood to a hydroelectric dam.
We didn’t
have a strategy or a budget. That is what I want you to know,
the lack of planning allowed us to be spontaneous,
nimble, we call it, and it allowed us to react very quickly to
problems as they arose. We followed our instincts (which you should
try to do), took risks (which you should only do sparingly), and
learned as went along, often from our mistakes (which you will
definitely do). We asked our families and friends for money. We
brought on volunteers, funneled resources from Boston to Haiti,
carried sinks and microscopes on planes and bought medications
on credit at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and slowly
assembled a team of Haitian teachers, doctors and community health
workers.
And all the time we
tried to draw connections between the near and the distant. The
near of Boston teaching hospitals with the
distant, rural, dusty clinic in Haiti. The near of people’s
hunger with the distant World Bank policies. The near of Haitian
boat people arriving on Florida’s shores with the distant
economic embargoes.
And as the number of
patients and their ailments grew so we expanded the services,
raising more money until the clinic became a hospital,
the classroom a school and the entity we referred to as “the
project” became Partners in Health. One patient became 10,
then 100. Before we knew it, there were 10,000 patients seeking
treatment—and their ailments started to broaden. They needed
not just healthcare, but houses and schools and clean water and
jobs. We kept coming back to raise more money from people like
you and then last year we saw that four employees had become 4,000
and 10,000 patients had become over a million in Haiti alone and
the projects have spread out to several countries. That is a snapshot
of how quickly things change. So feel free to start very small,
but allow yourself to imagine very expansively.
If a lack of a real
plan as we out all those years ago seems like an unorthodox approach
for a small group of people, then maybe
it had something to do with my unconventional parents. I grew up
with a courageous and talented mother, a stepmother who flew from
England to be here today, and father who wrote stories for a living—mostly
for children, which is good if you were his child.
He pushed up against
limits to a delicious degree. For the first 10 years of my life,
I had been fed nightly stories of “fleshlumpeating
giants” and “snozwangers” and “vermicious
knids.” I was convinced that a “fire-breathing bloodsuckling
stonecheckling Spitler” lived in the woods outside my bedroom
window. Papa Doc Duvalier had nothing to offer me!
My father led me to
believe for years that passing a mathematics test had more to
do with which dream powder a giant blows into
your bedroom window that night than actually studying for an exam.
He was convinced that imagination would be the most vital ingredient
for a fulfilling life and told me that if, at times, all you have
is your imagination, you will rarely feel alone. He died while
I was at Wellesley and some of our loveliest and last conversations
were about what I was studying here—Faulkner and Joyce and
Naipaul. Through his gentle urging I have relied on my imagination
enough to make it less of a jump to connect my life with the lives
of those I can’t see. I urge you to do the same because a
great deal of what you do will be influenced by your ability to
imagine an improved outcome, or a better device, or a more efficient
system, a new vaccination, or a vastly different Supreme Court.
Imagination will allow you to make the link between the near of
your lives with the distant others and will lead us to realize
the plethora of connections between us and the rest of the world,
between our lives and that of a Haitian peasant, between us and
that of a homeless drug addict, between us and those living without
access to clean water or vaccinations or education and this will
surely lead to ways in which you can influence others and perhaps
improve the world along the way.
At roughly
your age, I had an experience upon which I have been able to
build my life’s work so far. This can happen to you
as 12, 31 or 81. Maybe it has already happened. The key is to
live with an exquisite openness to the world. To not close any
part and to let it all, including the suffering of others, reach
you. It doesn’t have to be global health or social justice
or the fight against poverty (but it helps). It can be marketing,
academics, law, medicine, athletics, but my wish for you is that
you find your passion, your abiding interest, and dedicate yourself
to achievement in that area. The world will align around you.
Women of Wellesley, I have no doubt you will do extraordinary
things. You have well placed to do anything with your lives. Whatever
you choose to do with your talents and superb education, employ
your imagination broadly, fight hard for the things you believe
in, link the near and distant. And wear a helmet whenever possible.
May this time resonate for you. May your lives resonate in others.
Thank you and congratulations.
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