Advice to the Graduates: Better Stay Here

Why would you want to leave the green world?

Last year during Commencement Season I wrote a post that remains the most popular post I have yet written for The Comic Muse:

The post is full of sage advice, book recommendations, and the odd pearl. Go ahead and read it, if you like that sort of thing. But this year, I am afraid my mood is very different. I cannot in good conscience be so encouraging. Indeed, I am afraid I must put my foot down. This commencement business has gotten completely out of hand, and further silence on the subject could only be interpreted as consent to an absurd ritual. Allow me to expatiate…

Dear Graduates,

This weekend, or perhaps next, you will sit in hot and uncomfortable rented robes at your commencement exercises and listen to an invited speaker take more time than is strictly necessary to exhort you to go out and make the world a better place.

The speaker, no doubt, will mean very well.  

But I believe I have better advice for you.

I think it’s better that you stay right where you are.

I mean, think about it.

They’re going to want you to get a job, buy a car, rent an apartment. They’re going to want you to get six kinds of insurance, three forms of health care, amass even more debt, and schedule regular visits from a pest control company.

And for what?

Why would you put yourself through all that?

So that you can come home on Friday night, exhausted, flop down on the couch, and spend the five minutes before you lose consciousness reading Jane Austen?

NEWS FLASH, Ladies and Gentlemen:

you can flop down on the couch and read Jane Austen (and Plato and Cicero and Aquinas and Tocqueville) right now, without having to plow through five days of soul-destroying “work.”

Within weeks, I predict, you’re going to be sitting in an office, or “attending” a Zoom meeting with your laptop camera off, daydreaming about staying up late and talking with your friends about the Big Questions:

a.     When is it acceptable for an adjective, or noun, to take the place of the participle in the Latin ablative absolute construction?

b.     To what extent, if any, did the Black Death influence Chaucer’s poetic genius?

c.     Is Van Gogh’s Starry Night mimetic or expressivist?

d.     Why is there something rather than nothing?

Do you think your real-world boss is going to be interested in hanging out in the Break Room and talking about why there is something rather than nothing? If so, then I think you’re definitely going to be better off staying right here.

But Dr. McInerny (you say) how could we possibly continue to live on campus?

I have heard tell of a certain enterprising student, at a college I will not name, who made a nice little abode for himself, and for no little duration of time, in the choir loft of the college chapel.

That’s the kind of resourceful, outside-the-box thinking the “real world” would die for.

What I’m saying is, when there’s a will, there’s a way.

But Dr. McInerny (you say) how can we live without money?

I call to your attention Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue IV by the abstract expressionist painter Barnett Newman:

Newman’s paintings sell for tens of millions of dollars.

You see? You just need a few buckets of paint. A quick trip to Lowe’s and you’re golden.

But Dr. McInerny (you say) isn’t Newman’s sort of painting just that kind of expressive authenticity you used to criticize in your Philosophy of Art & Beauty class?

Of course it is. That’s why I urge you to sign your painting with an alias.

The point is, Dear Graduates, that you don’t know how good you have it. Friends, books, ideas, nature, prayer. This place is paradise. This place is why we fought the war.

Why would you ever want to leave us?

Because (you say) we need to make the world a better place!

Dear Graduates, I’ve lived in the real world, and let me tell you, the real world has zero interest in becoming a better place.

What the real world wants is to remain just as it is. And, as it is, it is a place of wanton deconstruction of:

a.     All that is good

b.     All that is true

c.     All that is beautiful

d.     All that is holy

e.     All of the above

They want you to think of your graduation as “commencement.”

I suggest you think of it as “retrenchment.”

Just. Stay. Here.

But Dr. McInerny (you insist) we at least have to try to make the world a better place!

Remember your Shakespeare, Dear Graduates. In several of Shakespeare’s comedies, the major characters are somehow thrust out of their world of political and social turmoil into what the critic Northrop Frye calls a “green world” (it is often a forest), a world of freedom and play and camaraderie and renewed faith.

The green world is the magical place where love triumphs over waste land.  

Dear Graduates, you’ve been living in a green world for four years.

Why go back into the world of political and social turmoil and try to convince it to “live green”?

But Dr. McInerny (you interject, reading from Wikipedia, your old essay-writing companion) in the green world, “the characters often find themselves in a state of freedom, innocence, and harmony with nature, where they can confront their desires, overcome their inner conflicts, and…and…

…ultimately return to the real world with a newfound sense of understanding and redemption.”

So, you see, Dr. McInerny, your argument about the green world refutes itself. We have to return and convince everyone that the green world is the real world.

That is low, Dear Graduates. Is this why we took such great pains to educate you? So that you could throw it back in our faces?

It’s time for us to go, Dr. McInerny.

This is madness.

We have to go now. Goodbye!

I fear this will not end well, Dear Graduates.

Goodbye!

Goodbye!

Goodbye!

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