When you start with language, whose meaning is more often than not taken for granted and then use it to mean differently, multiply, and unconventionally, in literature, you enter a world where resolution won’t be found or even assumed. At best, you will propose a sufficiently acceptable explanation of meaning, something we have to acknowledge is temporary, experimental, and hopeful.
It won’t be the last reading or the only one, but it will reflect your effort, your humility, and your sense.
Congratulations graduates and welcome to your families and friends. Today is the culmination of years of hard work, ambition, experimentation, and passion. Some of you have spent two years here at Berkeley and others of you have spent four or more. Each of you worked so hard to get here.
Your time as students has been a period of constant change and uncertainty. Many of you graduated from high school in the spring of 2020 – before there was a covid vaccine. Your senior years were disrupted by a pandemic that connected all of us and left us more isolated than ever.
You lived through wildfires, a strike, and two major wars.
You are also the first students to spend all of college with “a zoom option” to experience a new set of decisions about how you go to class and office hours.
Zoom made everyone more accessible and relaxed, even intimate, as we saw what hung on your walls (and you on ours) or the pillows on your bed. It also made our relationships more formal and fixed.
You started college before Chat GPT and now graduate with generative AI at your fingertips.
While there are many jobs and even whole professions that will be made obsolete or radically transformed as a result, “prompt engineering,” which is another way of saying clear, concise, and well-structured writing, is now the hottest skill in Silicon Valley. Congratulations!
But seriously…
In these contexts, all of you decided to study English, and it’s that decision that I want to talk with you about this morning.
I studied English too, as did both of my parents and my husband. I became an English professor – my husband is a political scientist, my father was a doctor, my mother a museum fundraiser. English opened very different worlds for each of us, as I expect it will for all of you.
Unlike us – or your parents and grandparents – you also declared your majors in English just as the New Yorker declared the death of the English Major.
That was unfortunate.
Now, obviously, all of you here have made abundantly clear that English is not dead here at Berkeley.
More than that: there is so much life and value and possibility in the kinds of literary study that you have pursued.
You might be savvy theorists able to close read to pieces the most seamless cultural fictions and you might be poets whose truths unsettle linguistic conventions and you might be historians who have traveled deep into the archives.
I hope that your knowledge of literature and criticism will stay with you as a resource for understanding relationships, work, power, and society. That it will help you to make sense of the emotions and experiences that you will encounter, giving you insight into other minds and worlds.
I also hope that it is a lifelong source of pleasure.
But, there is actually something more profound that I hope you carry with you: what John Keats calls “being in uncertainties.”
I realize that this “negative capability” is the opposite of the kind of value or knowledge that one expects from a Berkeley degree, but I believe “being in uncertainties” is one of the most valuable things that you all have learned while studying English literature.
The world’s complexity is legion–human, planetary, virtual, global.
And being patient within it is no small task.
When you start with language, whose meaning is more often than not taken for granted and then use it to mean differently, multiply, and unconventionally, in literature, you enter a world where resolution won’t be found or even assumed. At best, you will propose a sufficiently acceptable explanation of meaning, something we have to acknowledge is temporary, experimental, and hopeful.
It won’t be the last reading or the only one, but it will reflect your effort, your humility, and your sense.
This patience is the ability to be unafraid when something before you does not make sense – whether because it means too much or not enough (or both). To work from this place, word by word, line by line to find something that might make sense – and to build it into a thesis, a claim, a reading – is what you learn when you study literature.
It turns out that over the past several weeks, you have had a rare opportunity to see, first-hand, how this process, staying with something unsettling, rather than irritably rushing to resolution, can lead to exceptional outcomes that might have seemed impossible to others who weren’t reading in the same way.
Let me tell you what I mean.
Two days ago, campus protestors reached an agreement with Chancellor Christ and ended a long period of encampment.
Unlike many, many students at universities of all sizes and forms across this state and country, you have been daily witnesses to a passionate protest that remained, with very few notable exceptions, peaceful. This is remarkable.
You surely have a range of different opinions about it, but there is no contesting that protest has been a key part of your last year of college.
The protest might have interrupted your thoughts – as you asked yourselves whether you should participate, or what is the best way to address violence and suffering, what are the conditions of freedom, or whether the words and names being uttered are fair statements of fact of pain or of malice.
You might have struggled to find your voice and values in real time. And many of us on campus experienced this with you.
But, what you have experienced – both the level of dissent, the capacity for different points of view to be heard, and ultimately, the ability to arrive at a non-violent resolution – is highly unusual, even unique to Berkeley.
While other campuses canceled graduations or classes or brought in police. This did not happen at Berkeley.
And for all of the news stories, you might wonder why not.
I have one answer. This resolution was achieved by one of the only university chancellors in the country who is also a literary scholar like yourselves.
This moment of peaceful resolution is inseparable from the kind of patience, empathy, imagination, and persistence that I associate with the study of literature, with the ability to remain in uncertainties for longer than most.
Over the course of your lives you will find yourselves in situations that will appear to be intractable, situations that have no easy answer or outcome.
Sometimes they will be small challenges; other times they will be more monumental. They will be hard. But knowing how incompatible interpretations might not need to be resolved too quickly, how meaning unfolds in time, how negative capability is not simply inaction, will help you.
Knowing how to read a poem, which is very hard to do, really does prepare you for life. And you have had the incredible privilege of learning to read with the very best readers there are.
So, in conclusion, as you move from this extraordinary universe of ideas, an institution where you can test out theories, make mistakes, try almost anything, to a world where you will be called upon to use what you learned whether to support yourselves and your families, to advance a project or to lead and govern, I hope that you remain unafraid to go against the grain, as you did by majoring in English, and that you will have the confidence to be in uncertainties, even in moments of tremendous pressure and responsibility.
I want to congratulate your families, recognize your friends, and celebrate you for all that you have accomplished at Berkeley – and all that awaits you.