And now to introduce our commencement speaker.
He has upheld an immense appreciation for the arts and a deep commitment to cultural education,
both of which are important to a liberal arts education. He has also been awarded nine Grammy Awards,
no big deal.
Let's give a hand to the acclaimed jazz musician Wynton Marsalis.
(Applause)
Thank you very much.
Thank you all very much.
It's such a pleasure to be here today. I just
want to say before we were, we were just in the
assembly in the line.
I was speaking with Ruth and Miriam and Ruth chose not to speak to us in
Chinese or Latin or any of the 15 languages she speaks, she was speaking in English.
She said, wow.
Miriam said was my 35th commencement, I'm gonna make sure I really enjoy this.
She said you might maybe because it's your last. And we started to laugh.
And we talked about the need for an intensity in every experience.
And it was such a great feeling for me to see everybody walk past Miriam acknowledging
everyone that she's taught, and the way that she got full when she was introduced.
And I thought about all the students and all of the years. All of
Ruths travels and all of the
things that she had to do to achieve great things that we heard about today.
And it didn't make it more of an honor to speak with you today.
But it made me even more present and aware of the seriousness of what we do here today.
President Sean Decatur
Board of Trustees, faculty, senior administrators,
parents, grandparents, students,
Murray Horowitz,
Mark Rosenthal,
Barry Schwartz, and community members.
This morning we sit where generations had before us sat.
We've completed
courses, performed miracles,
pulled all nighters, made stupid mistakes, come back from abyss after abyss, and we have finally
scaled the jagged mountains in glory. We're here last
a year short of the new library.
At least a year short of a winning football season.
But we do, we do, and I want you all to know that I wrote this last night.
We do have the first outdoor graduation, in President Decatur's six year tenure Hallelujah!
(applause)
Faculty administration, teachers, students and alumni alike, decked out dressed down in full regalia.
Just the sight itself says everything we need to know. This is a significant moment in all of our lives.
It is an ending and a beginning, distinguished by its certain uncertainty, a clear demarcation
of an experience whose expiration date has come due, but whose promise begins as soon as tomorrow.
Graduates, I want you all to take a look around.
And I want you to take in the intentions
and the best wishes of everyone who
has traveled here to be with you in celebration of your achievements.
Those achievements also burnish the reputation of this 194 year old institution. Dedicated people who have come by
every mode of transportation imaginable. Their presence is an expression of pure love,
pride, respect, and of protection.
Well, they're here to salute you, to join you in joy and to ease your journey into the next phase of life.
I want you all to handle the pressures of this day, with grace and with gratitude.
It is an important ceremonial first step towards developing the type of grit and gravitas that life will definitely demand from you,
in so many unforeseeable ways. Today is a very important day.
You've succeeded in aligning and convening the stars in your constellation, with the stars in our constellation,
the Kenyon universe is all aglow.
From our oldest alumni, to our
youngest baby, the entire expanse of a human life is right here, in support of you,
and of this class,
they're all around you.
They're enveloping you in feeling.
I want you to c alibrate where you are in the time space of generations who have worn the purple and white.
Generations who embrace your position in this continuum of generations.
With your diploma, you are also handed a responsibility to provide fresh meaning to this tradition that will divide your past and future into two into three,
two word epochs into three two word epochs, before college, in college, and after college.
Well in these years, you've been educated in critical thinking through the classics and philosophy.
You've been provoked into curiosity and awe for the world around and inside of you through the musical precision of math,
and the molecular facts of the unseen.
You've been given insights into the ways of folks and of their laws, customs, and they are societal symbology.
You've learned through foreign languages that our planet is diverse,
complicated and lyrical, and that it slowly and deliberately reveals itself through the give and take of honest and direct communication.
You've been led even deeper into a relationship with the soul expanding presence and the timeless power of the fine arts.
Kenyon College has taught you to perceive the world from different perspectives,
and to come to reasonable, intelligent and empathetic conclusions about what you see and what you feel.
My father is a teacher. He taught us in high school.
First day of our class when I was a freshman, he had four of us stand in the middle of the classroom back to back.
He said describe what you see. We each described something totally different.
When we finished talking, he asked one question.
Does the fact that all of you see something different mean that you're not in the same room?
We had to laugh.
When I was nine years old, I worked at a gas station owned by a guy named
Mr. Clay. We call him bossy.
To give you a time perspective, gas was then 35 cents a gallon.
Now whenever you gave bossy some mouth when he told you to do something,
he would shake his head gruffly and admonish you, boy, I've been your age, you ain't been mine.
Well, it was something funny, then we laughed.
And we often repeated it in jest and in ridicule. But as time is past, bossy's perception has become clearer to me.
As you age,
time gets shorter, and things become much more present.
Your experiences are condensed, and the things that used to pass unnoticed now have your full attention.
Any game with a clock will show you that. Not one player is glancing nervously at it in the first quarter.
But check them when you get into the middle of that fourth.
Boy the clock is all they see. And time runs out. No matter where you happen to be in the game.
There was no way I could know when I met Murray Horowitz In 1987, we would be standing here on my first son's 31st birthday at Kenyon College.
That was everything out of his mouth Kenyon Kenyon, Kenyon.
Mark Rosenthal, Kenyon college when you coming to Kenyon man,
when you coming to Kenyon.
There are many other things were not apparent to me.
You have no understanding of what a 35 or 40 year friendship will be like with people you meet now.
They will see you through marriages, through divorces through the death of parents, their kids will stay in your home.
Life decisions you will lean on them. Consider that in this hour when you young and full of spunk and energy.
And no matter what size board life has already put on your behind.
Trust me, there are many, much larger ones to come.
I want you to be aware of where you are in time and space and mind, how you experience and digest events because things happen.
Just the little things you repeat every day, slowly make you into yourself with every repetition,
like practicing an instrument, or playing your favorite video game.
Or having your morning coffee.
Big things that you choose. Like getting married.
Big things you have absolutely no choice in.
Health issues, natural disasters.
Things you think are glorious, but they aren't.
Like what you liked that everyone liked when you at any age that a lot of people like the same things together.
And y'all feel that your sheer numbers will make it significant. But it won't.
Like the latest fad.
And then there are earth shaking, life defining things that will happen.
And you don't know that they've happened until it's too late.
Like the passing of Stella.
Or the last time you see a close friend who then passes away, things happen.
And it's just not possible to pick and choose a menu of experiences you would like to have from the arc of your life's journey.
Some of the most profound things that will happen to you will not be your choice.
Your only choice bless you will be your only choice will be how you choose to rebound.
How you choose to stand up. Not that you will stand up how you stand up, you see
OK, I'm not going to keep blessing you...(laughter)
You see,
though we all envision our future and we work towards it. T
he present is actually all that we can experience and it is often pressurized, chaotic and overwhelming.
In response,
popular pastimes
distract us from a single terrifying reality. The future is always right now.
So I ask you again.
Please be present today for your friends and your loved ones.
And allow that presentness of today to do develop into a daily presentness throughout your adulthood.
Look past dysfunctions.
If you don't have dysfunction, you're not alive. This is the nature of life.
Graduates, you will hear that an education in human ideas is impractical, foolish, and a waste of time and money.
But I'll submit to you that your relationship to the ideas and ideals that you have developed right here
at Kenyon over these years is the very thing that will deepen in meaning and enrich your lives as you mature.
That relationship saves you from an all consuming bitterness over left or right wing politics,
you were never taught to understand anyway.
That relationship
gives you time to turn a page.
It saves you from an innocuous future of binge consumerism or a cultish enslavement to online
cookie cutter predators that surround you with a curated world tailored to your endlessly devolving tastes.
Because everywhere you look, you only see yourself.
Class of 2019 Make no mistake about it.
Live as if this is the fourth quarter.
The world is a serious place and your life is the most serious thing you have.
Don't spend it away. In a pleasure induced stupor, at the cost of your personal power. This moment is not a rehearsal.
Soon, you will receive your diploma.
And that parchment
is also a suit of armor.
Should you choose to embody the ideas and the ideals of this Kenyon College education that armor will serve,
you well on this unruly,
primed and primal battlefield that passes for a globe spinning somewhere in the cold dark universe.
in the tranquility of this lush environment, on this balmy morning, these words may seem far fetched,
but the entire world on which your presence in a conflict as old as dust,
there is forever being fought over the dignity and the meaning of human life on this planet.
The victory of humanity always hangs in the balance.
And every sword in favor of it is always needed.
Because the future is always now we need you now. We need your energy and your enthusiasm.
We need your optimism and skill and insight we need your creativity and your humanity.
We need you to solve the world's drinking water crisis.
We need you to clean up the oceans, we need you to create a lower class economic infrastructure, so everyone has a sense of value through participation.
We need you to teach us how to value sharing as much as taking, you to show us how to fix our closed
minded and closed eared democracy. You doubt that we need you? Look at what the grown folks are doing.
We need you to free us.
From proudly accepting reduced personal freedoms.
We need you to insist on leveling the plane of opportunity for the disenfranchised,
in whatever your chosen sphere of influence will be.
And most of all, we need you to do all the things that Alexa is not and will not be able to do.
We need your participation in your own life.
And we need you now. Because your life is our lives.
And it is the most serious thing we have. I once gave a teacher of mine a composition I had worked on.
He looked at it for 10 to 15 seconds and handed it back and disgust and disdain.
What's wrong with it? He said,
There's not a single rest or breath in this. All great music must have a rest. You have to breathe, go back and work on this.
And so I say to you graduates, in this proud moment, at the end of a phrase in your lives,
so giddy with excitement, relief and release.
Full with celebration, feasting and the imbibing of different types of beverages at different levels of fermentation.
Take this time also to reflect and to genuflect to show gratitude. No matter how difficult.
To collect your experience, to enjoy what you have done, to submit friendships, and to begin
a graceful transition from what was to what will be by embracing this very day with an open eyed
intensity.
The genius composer and pianist Duke Ellington once said, there is no art without intention.
You have to play with intent to commit something.
Your life is your art. Be intent on committing to living it in person.
Today, I want you to commit the crime of staying off your cell phone, at the family dinner.
Congratulations it's your graduation. Thank you
(Applause)