Lucid Dreams
A Thought for Graduation
PHILIP TRAMMELL
Have the same mind as Christ.
PHILIPPIANS 2:5
So here we are. We couldn’t have made it without our friends,
and we’re so blessed for all our parents have done for us, and
we mustn’t forget Professor So-and-so. But of course, though
it looks a bit self-congratulatory to put in writing, the most
important thing is that we couldn’t have done it without some
serious motivation of our own.
Let’s write it anyway, and think about what it means.
We’ve just graduated because we each had little dreams, four
years ago, of the people we might become—and because
something motivated us to spend the last four years, more
or less, becoming them. We wanted to be artists; now we’re
artists. We wanted to be scientists; now we’re scientists. Or
maybe artists. Anyway, we wanted to be college grads and
now we’re college grads. Congratulations.
Where did all these motivations come from? It’s a rare
soul, I think, who remembers the minute of the hour of a day
that he felt God called him to an A.B. from Brown in cog sci.
For my part, I don’t have a clue why it always seemed so
important to me to go to college; I don’t know why I ended
up liking economics; I don’t even have a clear sense of why I
bothered writing the words you’re reading. Our dreams order
our lives, from before graduation to after the grave, but we
put almost no thought to where they come from. We let them
weave themselves, as it were, out of all the little experiences
we have throughout our days—just like our ordinary dreams,
our dreams of sleep. And likewise, it can shock us at first to
discover that they can, with some effort, be changed.
I would like to begin by telling you a story about Everett
Ramsden.
I took a look inside the yearbook office this year, as the
good people of the Liber Brunensis were putting the thing
together, and I saw almost all your names and faces being laid
out in an orderly record. And Everett’s too—though his I pulled
at random out of the old 1901 publication. Do you know who
he went on to become?
No, I’m sure, and neither do I; and so, as much as I would
like to, I cannot in fact tell you a story about Everett Ramsden.
When we walk out the Gates, something motivates us to
keep going. For our dream is never just to have a bit of paper
calling us chemists, or artists, or historians; we could have
gotten that first semester freshman year and still had $29.93
on the account. No—we dream of making medicine that cures
diseases, or making images that move hearts, or writing history
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that changes history. And since we’re no closer to pulling
that off now than we were a month ago, our dreams are still
unfulfilled; and so the congratulations we offer each other
upon graduating are only, at bottom, anticipatory celebrations
of all the ways in which our newly acquired skills might help us
fulfill them. They’re only appropriate, that is, for the graduates
whose grandest and noblest worldly dreams will come true. If
you’re The Next Whoever, I’ll say it again, in advance, and this
time I’ll mean it: Congratulations.
Everett Ramsden, it turned out, was not. For better or
worse, his entire life’s work—not even a hundred years past—
has been forgotten. There are approximately 600 million
websites in the world; his name appears on approximately
zero. And most of us, though we don’t like to hear it, are The
Next him. If you are reading my words today (let alone if you are
writing them), it is overwhelmingly likely that you have spent the
last four years learning things that people have already known
so that you can go on to do things that people have already
done, and that now you will do them, and that after that you
will die, and that no one will have any reason to remember you.
It’s not quite a certain fate, of course. Some of us are
bound to make the history books somehow, and not just the
yearbooks—and not just make them. But most of us won’t, no
matter how wide our opportunities or how great our effort; no
matter which our concentration or how fancy our degree; no
matter what our race or class or religious faith. If our prayer
as we leave this place is that our art moves hearts profoundly,
and our chemistry transforms lives immensely, and all that,
our prayer is almost certain to be denied. And if that thought
bothers us, there are exactly two ways out. We must fulfill the
impossibly massive aspirations with which our tiny, graduating
heads have been packed near to bursting, or we must make
new dreams.
Broadly speaking, there is an obvious first guess: we must lower
our standards. We must learn to see the true magnificence and
beauty of the life that a twenty-first-century American is lucky
enough to call normal. Simply maintain a paying profession, a
stable family, and a decent home, and we will have lived a life
worthy of higher praise than all the historians in the world could
bestow. As a bonus, our work may also do some sizable and
lasting good; but it’s nothing much to worry about or to strive
for. Something along those lines.
Since you can probably get that kind of life, if you want
to, you probably won’t be disappointed to dream of it—until
you remember all the work that this kind of aspiration leaves
undone. Let me remind you that since you read that line from
Philippians a few minutes ago, seven or eight people were
victims of murder. A dozen died of AIDS. A hundred starved. As
long as the world’s hearts remain unmoved, and its diseases
uncured, and its plates empty, and its people broken in the
thousand other ways you each know better, we cannot escape
the fact that there is a great task before us, and that we are
failing in it horrifically.
Whether you have dedicated yourself to the study of
writing or education, engineering or mathematics, millions of
your neighbors are depending on you, in some way or another,