Unofficial Transcript (August 7, 2001)
GARRISON KEILLOR’S BACCALAUREATE SPEECH
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
It’s good to be here on this perfect day in the
company of a lot of very smart people and the folks who brought them up and from
whom they inherited their good looks and a good deal of their
intelligence. It’s a great honor to
come and speak at your Baccalaureate, especially as I know that Princeton does
not invite many comedians to do this.
Princeton probably has enough experience with comedy among incoming
freshmen to know not to give one of those people a microphone at a solemn and
dignified event. Most colleges prefer a
standard commencement speaker who is eminent in a sort of vague statesman-like
way so that nobody is particularly mad at him and who will talk about the
commitment to excellence. But the
message of a comedian is closer to that of the Gospels that down deep life is a
mess, but it’s a beautiful mess if you don’t take yourself too seriously, which
you shouldn’t because we’re not so different as we pretend to be.
There is a lot of human nature in everybody. I learned this in church. I didn’t grow up attending inter-faith
services like this one, in which you have readings from different religious
traditions and in which you sing hymns about the fields and the forests. I grew up in a church where they painted
vivid pictures of the jaws of hell opening up and swallowing you for your sins
and where the preacher did not stand up on this high rostrum but walked up and
down the aisles looking for converts and shaking his Bible at them. These were the people who put the “fun” into
Fundamentalism. And we boys were always
made to sit down front where we could get the full impact of him.
It was the summer and the goldenrod was heavy in
the air as was the ragweed, and I was becoming emotional over that and the
preacher saw me weeping and he said, “Here’s one who’s under conviction of sin,
right down here.” And he came for me. I remember his shirt was wet, and his hair
was pasted to his head. He reached out
his hand and I took it, and he pulled me towards him, and I tripped and I fell
into his arms. And when I came into his
arms I could smell the whiskey on his breath.
It was an amazing discovery for a boy at the age of 12, to realize that
the preacher himself had his own contradictions and today was not one of his
winning days but he was still in the game.
He held me close to him, and he prayed to God that I would be spared
punishment for my sins. To have a drunken
man pray for your soul is a mysterious privilege that a person never, ever
forgets. All of the good people sitting
in back were not aware of this, but he was a sinner too and that’s what gave
him the authority to preach. And the
man who speaks passionately about the pursuit of excellence is a man who is
deeply aware of his own mediocrity.
I am in the field of comedy, the same as most of
you, and in our field, excellence is an illusive quality. There are no long-term goals. You’re only trying to have some immediate
effect on the situation. I got into
comedy when I was a kid. I was one of
those really quiet kids. They weren’t sure
if I was an introspective genius or if I was heard of hearing. And one day I was sitting in the school
cafeteria across the table from our class intellect, Leonard Larson, the guy
who always corrected you if you mispronounced words. The guy who was committed to excellence, at least on the part of
others. He was a tough critic who made
you pay a big price for a mistake. He
came from parents who had gone to college, so he picked up a big vocabulary
around the dinner table and also a very nice set of handy opinions about
things. I had a large vocabulary that I
got from reading books, so I was never quite sure about pronunciation. “Epitome,” for example, was a word I didn’t
use for years. Or “suave” or “hors
d'oeuvres,” “charisma,” or “inchoate.”
I sat across from Leonard as he ate his tapioca pudding and I told him a
stupid joke, one that involved mucus and yet, as dumb as it was, the timing was
perfect. He was just swallowing when it
hit him and I made Leonard Larson, our class intellect, exhale tapioca through
both nostrils. I have never had this
effect on anyone before. And it was a
big experience to see a great intellect turn red and yak up tapioca. Two long noodles of it, I thought he was
going to blow his entire lunch. I was
thinking cerebral hemorrhage and to me, at that point, comedy started to seem
like a noble thing. Destructive,
yes. Humiliating, yes, but not in a bad
way. A good line of work for somebody
who is not that smart.
A writer doesn’t have to be smart, as long as he
knows to steal from the right people.
Like Mark Twain -- you steal from him long enough and people will start
comparing you to him. So… I’m not the
one to talk to you about the pursuit of excellence. Obviously you’ve done that already. I’m here to offer an alternative. I think you should all go out and have a beautiful life that
includes adventure and romance and some failure and some misery and certainly
some remorse. And have this beautiful
life without regard to how it measures up to other people’s adventures and
romances and their miseries and their remorse.
We need to talk about the pursuit of failure, I
think. A person who does not know
failure is a person with a poor sense of reality. A person who goes through his 20s and 30s racking up one prize
after another, getting the great job and the beautiful size 4 wife and the starter
mansion and the two beautiful, gifted children with the Celtic names, is a man
who is headed for a gigantic mid-life crisis in which he runs away with a
waitress named Misty and perms his hair and becomes a 45-year-old
singer/songwriter. You don’t want to do
that. A mid-life crisis in which you
feel that, in spite of appearances, your life is meaningless and you’re a big
fat failure and nobody really likes you.
If you could, I think you should try having your mid-life crisis right
now, when you’re smarter and when you’re stronger -- and not have it 20 years
from now, when it’s going to be a big embarrassment to everybody. It’s amazing how much you can learn if
you’re lucky enough to get into trouble when you’re young. I recommend it to you.
I live in St. Paul, Minnesota, and, as President
Shapiro said, that is the hometown of F. Scott Fitzgerald and in St. Paul when
we think of Princeton, we think of Fitzgerald.
My house is in his old neighborhood.
And in the spring we get a certain number of high school students who
are wandering around looking for his place, who have read the Great Gatsby
in English and were moved by it. The
novel is 75 years old, but Fitzgerald managed to get down on paper a certain
kind of pure yearning that high school readers recognize as their own. Some of these high school students ask me if
I knew Fitzgerald myself and I tell them, only slightly. We went to different schools. But every day on my walk I pass a big frame
house on Summit Avenue with a veranda on two sides of it that used to belong to
a woman named Porterfield who ran it as a boarding house. And in the summer of 1919 Fitzgerald, at the
age of 23, liked to sit on that veranda with his friends, John Briggs and Don
Stewart, and smoke and talk about the novel he was writing and the girl in
Montgomery, Alabama, whom he hoped to marry.
He had gone off to Princeton with a beautiful
picture in his mind of a gothic campus and himself as a campus hero, winning
all of the prizes. He spent much of his
time at Princeton coughing [GK is
coughing, had water and continues coughing]. He was slightly tubercular, as I am, but he spent his time
writing for the Triangle Club and acting in their shows and his grades were
poor and he had to leave school. He enlisted
in the army hoping to go to Europe and get in the war and redeem himself. But the war ended before he could. His novel had been turned down twice, and
the girl had broken off the engagement.
He was living in a tiny third-floor apartment with his parents in St.
Paul with his alcoholic father and his spooky mother. And he spent every day in a little room where he had pinned the
chapters of his novel to the curtains and where he was busy writing new
material and cutting out big swaths of other material and reshaping the whole
thing. Everyone knows how this story
turned out, how the novel was published, and the girl married him, and he
became a famous writer of the twenties.
But when I think of Fitzgerald I like to think of him sitting on that
veranda, at the age 23, a Princeton dropout, so broke he had to borrow pocket
money from his friends and yet so full of courage and passion with an
indomitable spirit, looking forward to the next day and the next month and the
years to come and all of the love and glory in the world that he knew would be
his. The spirit of youth which is so
palpable here in this room.
Dear graduates, I am not one of those
Baccalaureate orators who takes you down a series of rhetorical corridors
called “dare to dream” or “the commitment to quality,” meanwhile your brains
are taking a short holiday and then you go to the parking lot and you find the
Chevy and you think, quality, okay, but what am I going to do for revenue? Oh brave young navigators, setting your
course toward tomorrow, speak kindly to your parents and perhaps you could
borrow two or three grand and have yourself a beautiful summer, lighting
candles against the darkness and marching to a different drummer – in Madrid,
Paris, St. Petersburg, Machu Picchu, learning what the open road has to teach
you and enjoying one last, innocent, romantic journey before becoming
internists or patent attorneys, so that when you’re my age, what we call
pre-senility, you would remember that summer of glorious irresponsibility and
the music and voices and the sights and the smells of barrooms and city parks
and cheap hotels, and your peregrinations, pedestrian and vehicular, and
beautiful people you’ve met, and the one person in particular who made your
heart pound that night along the Seine as you kissed as you might never, ever kiss
again, but then you kissed again and then one thing led to another and you had
an experience you won’t share with your father and mother. Use common sense, yes, but press on for love
and glory. Today’s grievous mistake is
tomorrow’s humorous story. Don’t grow
old as a person whose memoirs will consist of stories from the TV shows you
never missed. Live your life, so as
your last days come nigh, your adventures are the envy of other alumni. We can’t all be Aristotle or St. Thomas or
Erasmus or Socrates. Some of us due to
the law of averages might be Mediocrities.
But we can all live boldly with great esprit and panache and sometimes
throw whites and colored into the same wash, or buy the expensive wine, the
kind with corks, never mind the cost.
And walk into strange cities and have the good sense to get lost. Oh you are brave, and there is no other
choice but courage. What choice has the
flower but to blossom? Who would celebrate and honor you? Oh, I would. I would raise a monument made of Christmas
lights and all the pennants and plywood.
Even if I met you as a delivery person for Ray’s Original Pizza, I’d be
impressed, like when “A body meets a body coming through the Rye,” or coming
through the trees. You can recognize
quality even if it smells of onions and cheese. I believe in impulse, in all that is green, believe in the
foolish vision that comes out true.
Believe that all that is essential is unseen, and today, we all believe
in you. Whether rich or poor, sick or
healthy, in whatever instance, in a place of your heart, you will always be
Princetonians and that, my dears, is the whole story. It was a pleasure to attend your Baccalaureate. Thank you.
Princeton
University