The faculty elects the valedictorian each year, taking into account special
qualifications as well as scholastic ranking. This year's valedictorian is
Kyle Berlin, a senior, a senior from Arroyo Grande, California.
Is my hair all right?
Alright, well thank you. I want to begin in
gratitude to, to everyone here and not here who made everything possible from
as President Eisgruber said, the facilities staff who set up the thousands and
thousands and thousands of chairs, to the faculty who set up the classrooms, and of
course the family and friends who set up the love. There's a poem by Mark Doty
about a whale that swims around a harbor. He writes, "I expected the worst:
shallow water confusion, some accident to bring the young humpback to grief." But he
was wrong. The whale was not doomed, it was merely playing in the shallow water.
Doty goes on: "And though grief has seemed to me itself a dim salt suspension in
which I've moved blind thing, day by day through the wreckage, barely aware of
what I stumbled toward, even I couldn't help but look at the way this immense
figure graces the dark medium, and shines so: heaviness which is no burden to
itself. What did you think, that joy was some
slight thing?" Doty's poem is called "Visitation." My fellow graduates, our short
visit at Princeton University, at least in this period of our short lives, has
come to an end. It is my task now to say goodbye, to lend a few words of farewell
for our own visitation. I did not ask for this task or strive for it, but it's been
given to me. I am to deliver the valedictory address, which quite
literally means the farewell address. So the question before me now is what I
could possibly say that may function as a proper farewell for all of us? How do I
honor our togetherness and also our apartness, our joy and our sorrow, and our
sorrow? Our position in time, our contradictory and coexisting emotions
floating through the air, our heaviness and our lightness? What is
it that I wish you to know and to do as we all walk out those gates in a few
short minutes from now? I do not know the answer. This is a deliberate statement
against self certainty, which this university tends to exude, but it's also
quite simply true. I do not know what to say. And I have to be honest, in true
Princeton fashion, I was sitting right over there last night sort of
frantically writing this speech because I really, I'm serious, I did not know what
to say in farewell, and, and I did not think that I could speak to the feeling
of the moment before the arrival of the moment, if you know what I mean. So here
we are now, though, in the heart of the farewell, or the belly of the whale, so to
speak, and just let's just breathe in for a second with, with the sort of rhythm of
the giant cetacean lungs, if you will, with the rhythm of the
rustling trees around us on this beautiful day. Because I genuinely did
not know what to say, and I do not think myself particularly qualified to say it,
not least because I reject the individuating effects of award culture.
I've spent the last many weeks asking everyone I encounter, what it is that
they would say, that they wish everyone would hear or know or do in farewell. And
it's, it's really been a wonderful opportunity to listen to what you all
had to say and, and representative of the best part of my time here: simply hanging
out with with other people and informally talking about things that
matter. And I wish there were time to share all of the voices that I heard.
There are the people who told me to make you laugh. And I'm, I'm sorry on that one.
I recommend you just google the word jokes. I don't have time. There are those
who would draw attention to the white supremacy and class oppression of
Princeton and the country beyond.
There are those who told me to call out rankings, elitism, hierarchy, and notions
of a false meritocracy to speak for the people who did not like Princeton, to
warn against pride or pride in excess. There are those who would have me ask
you to give up some of your economic privilege and those who would draw
attention to the climate catastrophe in which we find ourselves that threatens
the very existence of the most vulnerable as well as our own lives. The
list goes on and on and on and I really really wish I had time or that those
people could come up here and talk as well but I don't so I'm just my own
addition to this long list is simply this. It is my parting wish that we find
it within us or outside of us - I don't really care where you find it - to
be able to truly listen to others and develop a compassionate stance towards
the world that moves beyond the tiny and tenuous borders of the self, that silences
the egoistic monologue assuredly running in your head this very moment. I
mean this on small scales but also on large ones, as we work to undo systemic
frameworks of oppression and equality and injustice found everywhere, including
here. I mean it not simply or glibly or romantically, not only to be nice but as
a challenge, to approach a radical sort of compassion that is awake and aware
and attuned to our own position in the world and how we are inextricably,
achingly, necessarily entangled with, entangled with others near and far.
Particularly in this moment, where meanness is mistaken for power, I wish
for us to enact a compassionate togetherness. The real work of our
education and really our lives is to figure out how we can better be alive
together in the short and fragile space of our visitation on earth. But, but we
cannot do this on our own as individuals. And, and my voice and, and that of people
like me, with historically loud voices, cannot be the only ones we hear. I mean
it: this has to be a conversation, a search, that we all commit to. And so I
turn the question around to you. What is it that that that you would would say
to everyone? What is it that you think everyone should know or do in this
moment of farewell, this very rare and special moment. And this may
make the beloved trustees uncomfortable, but I'm just gonna
literally ask you to turn to the people around you and try to answer that
question for one or two minutes. So the question to review is, what would you say
to everyone, what do you think everyone should know or do before heading out. Two
minutes: talk to people, introduce yourself, look around. Okay I'm gonna jump
down. I'll be right back. Don't worry, I timed this. It's fine. We'll be fine all right.
[APPLAUSE, CHEERS]
They're probably getting stressed up here, so I better bring it back. And and
sorry to cut off your conversations. I hope that they're productive, awkward or
uncomfortable in good ways. So, I had some great conversations, so thank you to
my conversational partners who I'd never met before.
Um anyway, by way of conclusion, by final farewell, let me just say that well, we
want things to end and we want them not to end. We want change and we want
everything to stay the same, termination and germination. Sitting here on
graduation day, we are ready to leave and we are sorry to leave. We are thrilled to
leave and loathe to leave, to wave our hands tenderly or raise our middle
fingers at this hallowed hall behind me, to give our hugs and shed our tears for
different reasons, to say goodbye, to never look back or to come running back.
Look around. Look at us. The shape of our faces, the depth of our eyes, the delicacy
of our skin, the pattern on the bark on the trees, the clouds in the sky.
Remember who is not here, who's been lost along the way.
Sense this sudden and temporary us. In us, in this moment. In us, right here, right
now, on graduation day, in this space between, surrounded by people we love and
who love us. This is sacred. The Class of 2018, what if we gave up greatness for
quiet compassion? What if we were number one not in excellence, with all its
disciplinarian and utilitarian and egoistic undertones but in compassionate
listening or repeated forgiveness or radical love?
I do not have a prescription to make this happen only in imagination. And, and
if we can't figure it out together, if if we can't ask the right questions, can't
forgive each other again and again, can't practice kindness as a deliberate ethos
and a knowledge, then who can? What else matters? There are concrete things we can
do. Let's do them. Let's let's walk out those gates before going our separate
ways resolved to working towards a more compassionate, more just world. I have a
feeling this may be the way towards the richest sort of joy, a shared joy.
Parabéns felicitaciones, congratulations to the compassionate Class of 2018!