Please don't settle for happiness. It's not good enough, Nobel laureate Toni Morrison said in her remarks to graduates this past Saturday at Rutgers University . . . “Of course you deserve it," she went on to explain, "but if that’s all you have in mind -- happiness -- I want to suggest to you that personal success devoid of meaningfulness, free of a steady commitment to social justice -- that’s more than a barren life. It’s a trivial one.”
Roxie's "typist" goes on to say, a bit lower down:
Photo from Rutgers University via Roxie's World
We are by no means opposed to happiness, and we are pretty sure Toni Morrison isn't either. Still, we've got a hunch that happiness should be a by-product or a consequence of the pursuit of those other, loftier ideals and not the object of the pursuit itself. If you are searching for meaningfulness -- in your work, your relationships, your way of moving through the world -- then we suspect you will end up feeling happy, at least most days, if by happiness you mean feeling satisfied with the general direction of your life and energies. However, if you focus on happiness primarily and lose sight of those larger-than-self aspirations, we worry that you'll wake up some morning twenty or thirty years from now and go, "Geez, man, is this all there is?"Principles to live by, and (maybe? somehow?) transmit to our snowflakes as well.
Photo from Rutgers University via Roxie's World
Toni Morrison also spoke at my commencement many years ago. The take-away message:
ReplyDelete"Yeah, the older generation screwed you over, but I have faith you will make your way in the world and do ok."
Needless to say, I was incredibly disappointed. The speech summarized above sounds much more inspiring, and might have helped our society avoid the mess it's in now.
Oh, who am I kidding?
Thanks for the link, CM. Nice to stumble on you out here.
ReplyDeleteActually, The_Myth, the nugget of Morrison's speech I quoted and wrote about, which is re-quoted here, is the most inspiring part of the speech. The rest sounds pretty similar to what you describe having heard years ago. Still, I like this nugget a lot and felt it was worth spreading around.
It beats the Strelnikov commencement speech, which would excoriate the students, their parents, grandparents, home countries, or Indian tribes. I would rant like a drunken sailor about the dean, the IT mother$%*kers, the head of the dental school, the blankety-blank liberal arts, those f@*$heads in economics, the goddamn cheats in the sciences. I would rip even the music students and the library tech people. In short everybody in academia, including pre-school teachers, would get a shotgun blast of rage right to the face and at the end I would scream "either you get out of this disgraced hellhole now, or my Latvians will have you skinned alive....and if any of you m*&^%$%^&@kers has any ideas, I have a .50 cal Desert Eagle pistol with a bullet with your f*&^kin' name on it."
ReplyDeleteBeats blowing smoke up their asses.....
Strel, I guess you're not looking for an "Oh Captain, my Captain" type of response, huh?
ReplyDelete@ Beaker Ben
ReplyDeleteI hate bullshit, and these frigging college graduation speeches are just flinging the bs with a snowshovel. Screw that; give `em the unvarnished, sandpaperlike truth....they didn't learn a Goddamn thing in college, they were suckers taken for a ride, they would be better off joining the Krasnii Mafia, the Naples Mob, the Triads, or the Saudi Army than spend 4+ years in a US school.
I honestly don't remember who gave the speech, or even if there even was one, when I graduated, which wasn't even all that long ago. Oh well. Remember to wear sunscreen, and all that.
ReplyDelete