Commencement Closing Remarks, 2000
May 14, 2000
Commencement custom accords the President the privilege of some final words. This is my eighth commencement as President. I have come to cherish this chance but I do try not to abuse it. In light of all that has gone before and all that is yet to come my words will be few.
"Hang on to your dreams." You must have heard that somewhere before, I certainly have. In this high commencement season on at least 1,000 platforms, graduation orators will reach for and find those words somewhere in their speeches. Say what you will in contempt of cliches, very occasionally, buried beneath the familiarity and the fatuity, is an important idea, an idea worthy of liberation. So it is in this case but, the liberation of that good idea requires one crucial amendment.
My message to you today is not "hang on to your dreams" but rather "hold fast to the power to dream."
Not a few of you must be asking: Is he putting us on? We are now William and Mary's latest and best crop and we're just, are just awesome. How has he improved the cliche he criticized merely by shifting focus from the dream itself to the power to dream. I accept your skepticism but please allow me a moment to explain.
When I was eight, I dreamed of an infinite supply of root beer available on demand and a brilliant career as first baseman for the Cleveland Indians.
When I was 16, I dreamed mostly about my high school sweetheart, getting out of that high school at warp speed and owning a supercharged Chevy Malibu SS in candy apple red.
When I was 25, I dreamed of getting out of the army becoming a congressman and saving my country from its folly by the sheer brilliance of my public career.
Enough of autobiography but do you take my meaning? Dreams change and not a few of them, viewed in retrospect, are embarrassing. And not one of us, I am afraid, can escape embarrassment for foolish dreams and so when a commencement orator with great emotion invites his audience to hold on to its dreams he may raise goose bumps but he is missing the point of the point he is trying to make.
What does define a great life? Certainly not the habitually goofy dreams of youth or the often stunningly superficial ambitions born in our early years of work. What makes for greatness is a sustained ability to dream stretching over a lifetime, a resilient capacity chastened by hard experience and tempered by painful disappointments that begins finally to throw up dreams that can confirm destiny and inspire achievement at the most profound level.
So the capacity to dream is both precious and fragile. Precious because the ability to dream is what gives wings to our most honorable ambition, it is what transforms the best parts of our minds, our hearts, our souls into the almost palpable the clearly indispensable things that make for a good, even a great, life.
Fragile, because the power to dream is like a candle in the wind, struggling to sustain itself against the greater and more persistent powers of darkness. Greater and more persistent the powers of darkness may be, but they are neither nameless, nor numberless, nor invincible. Let me mention three with which I have had unwanted encounters. They are formidable foes but they have never entirely beaten me and neither should they get the best of you.
The first is cynicism, a belief that because some are evil, all are evil, a conviction that because some are incapable of decency, that all are indecent; a confirmed view - that life is a sucker's game, the highest object of which is to make suckers of others in order to save ourselves. A cynic cannot dream, because he cannot escape the worst in himself. He cannot live a good life because a good life can find no purchase in the emptiness of a cynic's soul.
The second is the dying of curiosity. This is harder to explain. I may not even have chosen the right words to describe what I mean. It has something to do with the power to sustain enthusiasm, but that is not the whole of it. None of you now, at the peak of your intellectual powers, full of eagerness to taste all that life can offer, could possibly imagine the feeling of weariness that makes everything gray, that brings inward tears when you look back on who you used to be and then try to measure the immeasurable distance between what you had hoped and what you have achieved. Perhaps all that I am saying is that sometimes, the cumulative weight of life, the massed regrets, the numberless failed hopes, framed forever by the question "what if", seem momentarily to squeeze the joy from living. The antidote to that is an eager openness to new things, new ideas, new friends, new places. The cultivation of that openness requires a lifetime's effort to sustain. It is by no means easy but the effort is worth it and you should know the special quality of your William and Mary education has given you an immense head start over most of your contemporaries.
The third is a failure to remember first things. By first things, I mean those virtues which define goodness and which are the sine qui non for greatness. You know them well: love, honor, selflessness, courage, tolerance. You learned about first things first at home, then in your schools and in your religious organizations. I know that you learned much about them here. The challenge now is not just to remember them but to make them live in your life as your life becomes more complex, as your responsibilities become larger, as temptations become more subtle and more alluring.
Almost no one forgets first things in a day, a week, in a year even in a sum of years. The corruption of these virtues proceeds by degrees, by small but persistent omissions, by the consistent indulgence of tactical convenience rather than by some grand and calculated plan to embrace evil. Eugene O'Neill in Long Day's Journey Into Night caught something close to what I am trying to say:
"None of us," he wrote, "can help the things that life has done to us. They're done before you realize it, and once they're done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you would like to be, and you have lost your true self forever."
So there they are: the three mortal enemies of the power to dream. I have dwelt on these dark things not because I am pessimistic. Quite the contrary. I know you. I believe in you. I have been an awed observer of your potential to be great and good women and men. Your glorious sense of life your deep and consistent kindness to my wife, Anne, and to me has given us more joy than you can possibly know. My words are intended only to be constructively cautionary, a kindly meant caution to the William and Mary Classes of 2000, every one of whose members has the potential for greatness but only so long, only just as long as everyone of you holds fast to the power to dream and that demands, as I have tried to say, that you never ever, never ever, surrender to the powers of darkness.
One last thing. Most of you believe, I suspect - this is the final moment in the final chapter of your William and Mary days. I see some tears and I know that most of you are feeling a powerful, contradictory mix of the emotionally bitter and the emotionally sweet. You are thinking of the great teachers who have taught you, of that beautiful place on this beautiful campus that belongs just to you and, most of all, you are thinking of friends, friends who have become like your brothers and your sisters and whom you cannot bear to leave.
I have good news. Nothing is over. You can never really leave. The William and Mary chapter in your life's book is not final until the book itself is closed. Every one of you leaves behind a small but immortal part of him or herself that has made William and Mary better and different. And every one of you takes away a part of William and Mary that has made you different and better. And when you return, as you surely will, your College, our College will be here, still waiting for you as it always has, changing but unchanged, older but still young, eager to help you relive the glories of those imperishable years when all of you were young and beautiful and full of hope.
Good luck may all of your best dreams come true and may God Bless every one of you.
