KATE REED: To begin, some words of gratitude.
For friends and faculty, facilities workers
and families, behind each of us today, there
is an education that transcends books and classrooms,
an education about how to be human in this world.
And it is my great joy to be able to express my gratitude
to the innumerable influences that have shaped me,
that have shaped us.
Fifty years ago, in 1969, Princeton
went coed at the undergraduate level.
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I am here today not just or even mainly because of that decision
--
a decision as much about the needs of men
and Princeton's reputation as about educational equity
for women --
but also because of the countless people
who have stood up, sat down, fought
and continue to fight to make this place one that people
of all genders and backgrounds can one day
inhabit safely, joyously and in justice.
Thank you also to them.
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Commencement connotes beginnings,
and yet the valedictory address is a farewell address.
As this day is a paradox of beginnings and endings,
goodbyes and hellos, so it is a day of many feelings, sorrow,
gladness, bitterness, tenderness, complicatedness.
Princeton is a complicated place --
one which perpetuates steep injustices
even as it brings people together
in beautiful and unanticipated ways,
even as it creates the conditions for those contingent
and serendipitous encounters that may change
the courses of our lives.
My own academic trajectory is the result
of one such encounter.
As a lost pre-frosh visiting campus,
I wandered into a course on modern Latin American history,
thinking it was a lecture on popular music.
Fifteen minutes later, I left that lecture hall
determined to take the full course as soon as I could.
The professor of that class has become a dear mentor
and friend, one of the people I am most
glad to have met at Princeton.
So in addition to this complicatedness
and the bittersweetness of new chapters,
nervousness has been my prevailing emotion
this weekend.
Really, I've been nervous since I
learned that I was supposed to speak with you today.
I'm not a public speaker.
On the few other occasions that I've given speeches --
exactly twice --
I've cried in the middle of both.
I can't guarantee it won't happen again.
In fact, I found that the only times
when I'm relatively more comfortable speaking publicly
have been those occasions when I do not
speak my first language, which is English.
Counterintuitive perhaps but I have a theory.
I'm supposed to be good at English --
excellent, in fact --
to write in such a way that both the content
and the form of my speech work together
to create meaning to speak well.
It is partially on the grounds of these suppositions
about my facility with words that I
have been given a microphone this morning and a podium
to hide the fact that my legs are shaking.
In another language, it is easier
for me to more fully embrace the very obvious limits
of my knowledge and capacity to stop
in the middle of a sentence and say, honestly,
I don't know how to say this, to let the people with whom I'm
speaking help me to circumlocute or perhaps even hit
upon the right word.
Apuesta is one I learned recently --
bet in Spanish.
In these moments of shared uncertainty,
when a singular voice is inadequate,
speech becomes conversation.
We allow for gaps and pauses, moments
of working through, allowing for these conversations,
for these silences can be difficult.
We are trained in speech and in writing
to fill silence, to seek coherence, create clarity,
build certainty.
When we can't do those things, when
we are uncertain and muddled, we are more vulnerable,
more aware of ourselves and of our limits,
more aware too of the limits of language itself
and of the ways in which the world will always
escape the words with which we tend to confine it.
As a student of history, I spend more hours
than I'd like to admit looking at old pieces of paper,
trying to read worlds back into words.
In the archive, one traces the interstices
between the firmament of reality, those dusty moldy
scraps, and flights of imagination.
What was the world like for those papers' authors?
What did they see, hear or think?
How did they understand the world?
Missing from this exercise are those voices and stories
that were never committed to paper,
never shuffled into folders and slotted
into boxes for curious students to come calling.
The absence of those voices may make the entire enterprise
seem futile.
The poet Francis Ponge writes that there will always
be a fundamental difference between the subjects
of his poems and the poems themselves.
The subject will always be more important, more interesting,
more capable, full of rights.
So too will any present understanding
of the past be fundamentally different from the past.
So too will any human understanding
of the world be circumscribed by the limits
of individuality and human perception.
This is not to say that we should not
endeavor to understand our world more fully.
Ponge was still a poet after all,
and there are still a few historians wandering around.
I think they're pretty cool.
It is to raise certain questions to ask what our world might
look like if instead of locking doors and closing curtains when
confronted with difference, we admitted our limitations, using
them not to foreclose further discussion,
but to start conversation to allow other voices and silences
to alter our narratives.
It is to raise questions like, what
if we were to dwell in that space of vulnerability,
that uncomfortable liminal subjunctive space
of openness and uncertainty?
What if when we went to office hours and told our professor we
were having a hard time, they said not only "I'm sorry,"
but also --
as one of my professors said to me recently -- "hey, me too --
let's talk about it"?
What if instead of constructing seamless narratives,
we left space for the unvoiced silences,
acknowledging we may never be able to fill those spaces,
but giving them space nonetheless?
I myself don't know the answer to these questions,
what the world they suggest would look like.
I struggle to be vulnerable, to admit
to the edges of my knowledge, to my weakness and sadness
and fear.
The world we inhabit today is not always
kind to this sort of honesty and the conversations it inspires,
which is why in a world that prizes individual achievement,
self-sufficiency and private initiative,
acknowledging vulnerability can be a somewhat radical, even
subversive, act.
It challenges the boundaries and borders
that divide us, inviting empathy into places where emotions have
long been discounted as signs of weakness,
undermining hierarchies and reminding
us of our fundamental shared humanity.
When building solidarity across these boundaries,
across difference and inequality,
vulnerability must be a precursor,
especially for those who historically
have occupied positions of relative power.
This is because vulnerability entails
not only scrutiny of ourselves, but also scrutiny
of our position in the world.
It asks that we be attentive to the ways certain voices
and needs have been silenced or rendered invisible,
while others are given microphones, podiums
and platforms, and that we question these inequalities
with care, that we notice the starkly unequal distribution
of different kinds of vulnerability and voice.
Princeton in both its injustices and its ability
to instill insight has prepared us
well to meet the world beyond FitzRandolph
Gate with this kind of attention and awareness.
So my hope for us today is that we
can learn to walk out to where our experience fades away
into the unknown and not here.
Rather than assume the universal applicability of our worldview
or reject that which is challenging, different or
other, we approach with humility,
with a desire to understand, with an openness
to encounter that may change our lives.
I hope that we leave space for silence
and ample room for uncertainty that we can exist together
in the complicatedness of this world
without losing our capacity to be vulnerable, to be brave.
Class of 2019, it has been a sincere joy
to be together this morning one last time.
Congratulations.
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