Please join me in welcoming Kenyon College's 188th Commencement speaker,
John Green. Thank you.
Thank you so much. President Decatur, faculty, staff, parents, friends and
members of Kenyon's Class of 2016: congratulations to all of you. Seventeen years
ago, I was supposed to be graduating from Kenyon. It ended up taking me an extra
semester, but I was in the audience that day with my friends and classmates. I
remember nothing about the Commencement address except that it lasted for 10,000
years. Like, empires rose and fell and still the
speaker droned on, cicada-like in his monotony, so I come to you today with but
one solemn promise. One way or another, this will be over in 14 minutes. I want
to spend one of those minutes, if you don't mind, in silence. This is a trick I
learned from the children's television host Mr. Rogers. If you don't mind, I'd
like us all, not just the students but all of us, to close our eyes and think
for one minute — just a minute — about the people who loved us, up into this moment.
Family and friends, teachers and kind strangers. I'll keep the time.
Those people, they're so proud of you right now.
My thoughts turned inevitably back to my years at Kenyon and to my professors,
especially Don Rogan, who died this school year.
Professor Rogan was a brilliant teacher, but I've forgotten
much of what I learned in his classes about phenomenology and gospel redaction.
What I remember most is that he loved me, and that he took me seriously. He and his
wife Sally welcomed me into their home, fed me, laughed with me, cried with me, and
for many years I wondered why he loved me. Like, I wasn't a particularly good or
committed student. I showed no particular promise, and then when he died I saw the
grief-stricken Facebook posts pour in from his old students, and I realized he
had loved us all. Love is not like mass or energy. It is not conserved, and in the
next 17 years you will forget a lot, but you will not forget the kindness and
generosity of those on this hilltop who were kinder and more generous than they
needed to be. So when I was a student here, there was widespread agreement
among my peers that the so-called "real world" of proper adulthood was basically
a disease you caught and then eventually died from. Like, adulthood with its
mortgages and spreadsheets and lawn maintenance seemed to be a thing to be
dreaded and resisted until finally it overtook you like a zombie plague, and
then, like, once you acquired adulthood you would start saying things like, "brand
awareness in a fractured media landscape" and "we need a president who knows how to
get things done." To be an adult meant engaging in totally unironic
conversations about the weather. I remember once when I was at Kenyon, my grandmother
called me to tell me that she was watching The Weather Channel and that it
looked like it was raining in Ohio. I explained to her that I was reading
Ulysses — that I wasn't even in Gambier, but in Dublin, Ireland, in 1904 and that
history was a nightmare from which Daedalus was trying to awake and that
nothing, literally nothing, mattered less than the current weather, and then after
a moment she asked, "Well, is it raining, or isn't it?" To be an adult was to be a
river rock blasted by an endless torrent of mundane terrors from resume
formatting to electricity bills that would inevitably smooth all my hard
edges until I looked and felt just like everything else. Now this is the part of
the Commencement address where I am supposed to tell you that in fact
adulthood isn't so bad and blah blah blah, but no! No, it is so bad!
If anything, it is worse than I could have imagined — I mean, have you ever been
to a homeowner's association meeting? Like, each of you in the Class of 2016 is
a wondrous and precious and rare life in a vast and almost entirely dead universe.
Imagine devoting two hours of your bright but brief flicker of
consciousness to a debate over whether the maximum allowable length of grass in
your neighborhood's front lawns should be four inches or six. But it's true, you
will debate grass lengths or something equally stultifying. You will learn
almost against your will the difference between whole and term life insurance.
You will test drive a minivan and find yourself surprised by the quality of its
handling, and along the way — along the way — you'll find yourself wondering, "Why am I
doing this? Why am I doing any of this?" And this is, in my experience, where your
Kenyon education will come in very handy because whether you've studied economics
or anthropology, for the last four (or if you're like me five) years, you've been
investigating what constitutes a fulfilling, successful human life and I'd
argue that actually IS adulthood. Like, maybe adulthood isn't something you've
spent your time at Kenyon preparing for — instead, maybe you've been doing it,
albeit not on the minivan scale. You're probably familiar with the old line that
"a liberal arts education teaches people how to think," but I think it mostly
teaches you how to listen. In your classes and in your readings, you've been
listening. You've listened to your professors and to your peers but also to
Toni Morrison and Jane Austen and John Milton as you all together examined the
big questions of our species: what do we owe ourselves and what do we owe others?
What is the nature of the universe and what is our role in it? How best might we
alleviate the suffering within and without? You learned about these questions at
Kenyon but you won't leave them here, and while making your voice heard on those
questions is vital, you've also learned here that your voice gets stronger the
more you listen, and not just listening to loud voices but also to those that
are hard to hear because they've been systemically silenced. I hope that
listening will help inoculate you from the seductive lies of our time: the lie
that strength and toughness are always assets. That selfishness is not just
necessary but desirable. That the whole world benefits most when you act in your
own narrow self-interest. That seductive lie is appealing because it allows us to
go on doing what we would have been doing anyway because it imagines a world
in which I am what I feel myself to be, the exact center of the universe. But
living for oneself, even very successfully, will do absolutely nothing
to fill the gasping void inside of you. In my experience, that void gets filled
not through strength but through weakness. You must be weak before the
world because love and listening weaken you. They make you vulnerable. They break
you open, and it is only when you are weak that you can truly see and
acknowledge and forgive and love the weakness in others. Weakness allows you
to see other humans not as enemies to defeat but as collaborators and
co-creators. In the end, we're making human-ness up together as we go along. At
the homeowners association meeting where the miserable adults are debating grass
lengths, what they're actually doing is hashing out what kind of neighborhood
they want to share. When you're deciding between whole and term life insurance,
you're actually thinking of a world without you and how you might be helpful
to those you leave behind, and how lucky you will be to leave people behind, to
have been woven so deeply into the interconnected web of the human story.
All of it, actually, from electricity bills to the job where your co-workers
call themselves teammates even though this isn't football for God's sakes, all
of these so-called horrors of adulthood — I lost my place. There we go. —
All of these so-called horrors of adulthood emerge from living in a world
where you are inextricably connected to other people to whom you must learn to
listen, and that turns out to be great news, and if you can remember that those
conversations about grass length and the weather are actually conversations about
how we're going to get through and how we're going to get through together, they
become not just bearable but almost kind of transcendent. One more way that
listening will be of use to you: over the next few days, you're going to straggle
out of this strange and wonderful place and enter a world where you will be, at
least for a little while, manifestly weak. If you're lucky enough
to have it have a job, it will likely involve fetching coffee for ungrateful
bosses or entering data or writing press releases that no one reads. Some people
will probably treat you as less than fully human, imagining you not to be the
complex and multitudinous person you are, but instead as an easily replaceable cog
in the clockworks of their organization. And all of that will be easier if you
can see yourself not as the protagonist of your own heroic journey but instead
as a collaborator in a massive sprawling human epic. I don't remember anything
said at my Commencement address, but I do remember Wendy McLeod's speech the day
before. Professor McLeod, I apologize in advance for butchering your quote and
for not swearing when you swore, but she said something like, "You're about to be a
nobody and that's important because when you become a no — and that's important
because when you become a somebody, if you can remember what it was like to be
a nobody, you won't be a jerk." This is — the parents are clapping!
Looking back, I think that's about the second best piece of advice I've ever
received, behind only that given me by Professor Rogan who once told me, and
this I can quote directly, "You're a good kid, but you need to learn when to stop
talking." So I will shut up momentarily. And anyway, I can offer you no real
advice on how to live a successful adult life, but I don't need to. The people you
thought of during that minute of silence? They are who you want to be when you
grow up. They have been strong for you but also weak for you. They listen to you.
They were irrationally, impossibly kind to you. It's not just that you wouldn't
be here without them. You wouldn't BE without them. If they're here today, I
hope you'll take a second to thank them. And if they aren't, they may call later
to ask you how it went. They may even ask what the weather was
like. Tell them it was rainy. Inexcusably cold for late May, and remember to ask if
it is raining in their pocket of the world. Thank you.