“Be a good steward of your gifts,” the poet Jane Kenyon urged in what remains some of the finest advice on writing and life ever committed to words. Our gifts come unbidden — that is what makes them gifts — but with them also comes a certain responsibility, a duty to live up to and live into our creative potential as human beings. “Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins,” James Baldwin admonished in his advice on writing. “Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.” That durational willingness to work at our gifts, to steward them with disciplined devotion, is our fundamental responsibility to them — our fundamental responsibility to ourselves.

 The night gardener once asked me if I knew how citrus trees died: when they reach old age, if they are not cut down and the manage to survive drought, disease and innumerable attacks of pests, fungi and plagues, they succumb from overabundance. When they come to the end of their life cycle, they put out a final, massive crop of lemons. In their last spring their flowers bud and blossom in enormous bunches and fill the air with a smell so sweet that it stings your nostrils from two blocks away; then their fruits ripen all at once, whole limbs break off due to their excessive weight, and after a few weeks the ground is covered with rotting lemons. It is a strange sight, he said, to see such exuberance before death.

When We Cease to Understand the World, by Benjamín Labatut

 Hello, my friends! It’s a great, great honor for me to be here with you guys today — particularly meaningful because I know this is the first one of these, live, in a couple of years. 

OK, let’s take stock: It’s 10:28 AM, June 10, 2022. 

Do me a favor: Close your eyes for a second. Call into your consciousness a fast-cutting montage of the 120 million seconds of your educational experience that have led you to this moment. Bring it into your mind:

The pandemic waves. The gut-wrenching reckonings. The friendships. The papers. The Zooms. The masks. The readings. The labs. 

All of it — call it to mind.

Now, eyes still closed, feel the air around you — that very particular stultifyingly hot Southern California air — on your cheeks; feel the heat building up between your head and your cap; feel the pressure of the chair on your butt.

That feeling right there, of the air and the pressure? That is the feeling of all it about to be behind you. It’s the feeling of you, on the brink, about to cross over.

OK, open your eyes. Thank for indulging me in that meditative moment (part of which was lovingly borrowed from my pal Robert Krulwich).

When I was first asked to deliver the commencement address, I was a little scared. I didn’t think I was up to it. You all are about to graduate from one of the top colleges the country. You’ve already weathered a singularly difficult moment in human history: What could I possibly say to you, as you stand on the brink, that resembles wisdom?

And then I thought, perhaps that’s the point: There is a void out there. Looming. For all of you. That void is called tomorrow. What will happen tomorrow? What will happen the day after tomorrow? 

I imagine some of you are already terrified of this. If you’re not, I bow to you, but perhaps in a few months, when it’s time to go back to college and you realize, Oh damn, there’s no college to go back to. There’s just life — the string of days that is my life, one after another, until I die.

Maybe then, in that moment, you’ll have that feeling of Uh-oh: What. Now. What do I do?

I would like to address this existential question and the angst it presents. (I feel a little bit of that angst looming in the air, commingling with the heat.)

I brought two pictures with me to help: I brought a picture of my grandfather — you can’t see this, but just imagine me but with an Arab Man Mustache, sepia — and I brought a picture of a monarch butterfly. I bring them as offerings to you, as spirit-guides on your journey.

In 1915, my grandfather was about ten. He lived in a village called Waidi Shahrour, which is in the mountains of Lebanon. It’s just him and his two brothers and his mom. His dad — my great-grandpa — had gone off to Brazil to find some work. But then he’d gotten trapped there, because this was WWI and the entire country was blockaded — you had the Allied Forces (let’s call them) on one side, and then the Germans on the other — and nothing or no one was allowed in or out. So the entire country was starving. It’s a pretty small country — 400,000 people. 200,000 had died. This is now referred to as the Great Famine of Mount Lebanon.

So: My grandfather is a little boy, as I said. And his mom — my great-grandma — has to feed the family. So she decides on this plan, where every week, she, my grandpa, and his two brothers would get produce from their village, and they’d pack it into carts, and they’d walk up and over thirty-five miles of snow-covered mountain, and back down to where the Germans were stationed, and then they would sell their produce to the German army, and in exchange get wheat and flour and dried milk and other things, which they’d pack into carts, drag thirty-five miles the other direction, up and over the mountains, back near their village, where the Allied soldiers were stationed, and then they’d trade that stuff with them. 

And that’s how they survived: They traded supplies between the enemies that occupied their country. It’s a particularly Lebanese existence. 

And they made this trip once a week, every week, on foot: thirty-five miles one way, thirty-five miles back.

Well, one day, on the return leg of one of these journeys, my great-grandma — my grandpa’s mom — stops, clutches her chest, falls over, and dies. So there’s my grandfather — a ten-year-old boy — staring into a void.

What the hell do you do in that moment?

I imagine him looking at his mom, his two brothers, and the carts full of grains and dried milk that still had to be traded or else they’d starve. And he just knew. Somewhere inside of him, there was now a deep understanding. The tectonic plates of him had realigned.

So what did he do? He buried his mom on the side of the road. And kept on walking.

He was ten.

Now, he would eventually have a moment to actually process this — when he was seventy, he’d return to that spot on the side of the road and weep for an hour — but, at the time, he just kept walking.

Now fast-forward, and he has a family of his own, one of whom was my dad. And he works three jobs to ensure that my dad would go to university. My dad did not want to go to university, but my grandfather said, You are damned well going to go to university and you are damned well going to be a doctor. Because nobody in the village of five thousand people had ever done that. So my dad went to university, met my mom, they come to America — again, another first for the village — and, there, they had me: this nerdy kid who would go on to make a show called Radiolab. And here I am.

There are times when I’m walking down the street in New York, just feeling the force of the earth on my feet, and the sheer improbability of this chain of events stops me in my tracks: None of this had to be. I was not inevitable. You are all not inevitable. You did not have to be here. I certainly didn’t have to be there, because I wouldn’t even exist, were it not for a ten-year-old boy who had to bury his mother on the side of the road.

Why am I telling you this?

Because here we are. 

This is a happy moment — not a sad moment! But it is one of those moments where everything is about to change for you. Where the future is more unknowable and unconquerable than you can possibly fathom. And I don’t mean this in a generic sense: It seems to me that it’s your generation’s particular inheritance to be faced with things that are too big, too much, too overwhelming. The planet is on fire — my generation has failed you in that regard. Democracies are on fire. There’s a plague of misinformation — again, we’ve let you down. Oh, there’s an actual plague — not sure what we could have done about that, but we probably let you down there, too.

Point is, like that young boy in 1915, circumstances have left you with not a whole lot choice but to put one foot in front of the other and walk into whatever is next. And if I have any wisdom to offer you, it’s this: 

You don’t have to fully comprehend anything now. All you have to do is walk. Just set yourself in motion, and let go of everything else.

And as graduates of Caltech, you are in a position, more than most, to know the awesome gravity of the void you are walking into. The gift, and the curse, of the scientific mind is to know that every time we presume to see the whole of something, the plane of reality will tilt to reveal new mysteries — here I’m quoting from a writer friend, Maria Popova — and when reality does that tilt, we’re always “staggered with the sudden sense that we had been looking at only a fragment. The history of our species is the history of learning and forgetting and relearning this elemental truth.”

You all know this. You’re the ones who have the clearest sense that there is so much we do not know. But as graduates of Caltech, you are also the ones with the greatest ability to see possibility in that void. To walk into it and discover and create and build the unimaginable.

And one of the wonderful things about my grandfather’s story, to me — and the reason I offer it to you — is that you do not know how the story will end. My grandfather could not have fathomed a world where people download packages of audio data called podcasts through the air onto things called smartphones, and that someone could possibly make a living doing this. If he were here next to me right now, think of all of the things I would have to explain to him for that last sentence to make sense to him. And yet, he helped create it all.

And here I’ll quote the final words of the science fiction series The Expanse:

“You will never know the effect you will have on someone, not really. It doesn’t matter if you know. The universe will never tell you if you are right or wrong. You just have to try.”

It’s a little humbling, that thought. But I find there’s also a comfort in this way of thinking, in that it’s not just up to you.

Which brings me to my second picture.

Preparing for this commencement, I learned a startling fact: The monarch butterflies that you sometimes see here in Los Angeles, they migrate about 3,000 miles from Vancouver Canada to Michoacán Mexico — that we knew. What I didn’t know was that each leg of that journey takes the monarchs three to four generations. (Apparently, researchers just learned this.) Three to four generations, each way. 

Think about that: A new butterfly takes flight from a eucalyptus tree in Vancouver. By the time the butterflies get here, to Los Angeles, that mother butterfly is gone, her child is gone, and her child’s child is now doing the flying. By the time they make it to Mexico, it’s the child’s child’s child.

It is unsettling, to see yourself as just one particle in a stream. One butterfly in a kaleidoscope. (Did you know that groups of butterflies are called a kaleidoscope? Isn’t that cool? I didn’t know this until, uh, yesterday?)

And the thing is, you might not be the first butterfly. You won’t know it, but you might be the third — or, more likely, the three-hundredth. Taking the work and the knowledge and the discoveries of those that came before you. And, in your life time, you are going to move it forward in ways no one could have imagine. And you’re not going to get all the way. And that’s OK. Because without your effort, humanity is never going to get there.

So, to conclude: I wish you all so much luck, so much fierceness, as you take flight tomorrow. And the next day. And the next.

All of us old people up here — myself included — are counting on you. But we’re also with flying you. You know, looking back on my early twenties, I remember feeling that my story was singularly mine to write. I now see I’m part of a larger flow. And stepping up here, to this podium, I said to myself, C’mon, grandpa. It’s time.

He’s up here with me. The whole village is up here with me. And all of us, we fly with you tomorrow — a human kaleidoscope.

So: Let’s do this, butterflies. Let’s change the future.

 When my atheist engineer grandfather died, my atheist engineer grandmother leaned over the body in the hospice bed that had contained half a century of shared life and love, cradled the cranium in which his stubborn and sensitive mind had dwelt, and whispered into the halogen-lit ether: 

“Where did you go, my darling?”

Toward the end of the novel, Mr g watches, with heartache unknown in the Void predating the existence of universes and of life, an old woman on her deathbed, the film of her long and painful and beautiful life unspooling from the reel of memory, leaving her grief-stricken by its terminus, shuddering with defiant disbelief that this is all. 

“How can a creature of substance and mass fathom a thing without substance or mass?”wonders Mr g as he sorrows watching her succumb to the very laws he created. “How can a creature who will certainly die have an understanding of things that will exist forever?”

And then, as a faint smile washes across her face, she does die. Lightman writes:

At that moment, there were 3,​147,​740,​103,​497,​276,​498,​750,​208,​327 atoms in her body. Of her total mass, 63.7 percent was oxygen, 21.0 percent carbon, 10.1 percent hydrogen, 2.6 percent nitrogen, 1.4 percent calcium, 1.1 percent phosphorous, plus a smattering of the ninety-odd other chemical elements created in stars. 

In the cremation, her water evaporated. Her carbon and nitrogen combined with oxygen to make gaseous carbon dioxide and nitrogen dioxide, which floated skyward and mingled with the air. Most of her calcium and phosphorous baked into a reddish brown residue and scattered in soil and in wind.

But then we see that every atom belonging to her — or, rather, temporarily borrowed by her — truly does belong to everything and everyone, just as you and I are now inhaling the same oxygen atoms that once inflated Walt Whitman’s lungs with the lust for life:

Released from their temporary confinement, her atoms slowly spread out and diffused through the atmosphere. In sixty days’ time, they could be found in every handful of air on the planet. In one hundred days, some of her atoms, the vaporous water, had condensed into liquid and returned to the surface as rain, to be drunk and ingested by animals and plants. Some of her atoms were absorbed by light-utilizing organisms and transformed into tissues and tubules and leaves. Some were breathed in by oxygen creatures, incorporated into organs and bone.

Pregnant women ate animals and plants made of her atoms. A year later, babies contained some of her atoms… Several years after her death, millions of children contained some of her atoms. And their children would contain some of her atoms as well. Their minds contained part of her mind.

Will these millions of children, for generations upon future generations, know that some of their atoms cycled through this woman? It is not likely. Will they feel what she felt in her life, will their memories have flickering strokes of her memories, will they recall that moment long ago when she stood by the window, guilt ridden and confused, and watched as the tadr bird circled the cistern? No, it is not possible. Will they have some faint sense of her glimpse of the Void? No, it is not possible. It is not possible. But I will let them have their own brief glimpse of the Void, just at the moment they pass from living to dead, from animate to inanimate, from consciousness to that which has no consciousness. For a moment, they will understand infinity. 

And the individual atoms, cycled through her body and then cycled through wind and water and soil, cycled through generations and generations of living creatures and minds, will repeat and connect and make a whole out of parts. Although without memory, they make a memory. Although impermanent, they make a permanence. Although scattered, they make a totality.

Here we are, you and me, Walt and Alan, my grandmother who is and my grandfather who is no more — each of us a trembling totality, made of particles both absolutely vulnerable and absolutely indestructible, hungering for absolutes in a universe of relatives, hungering for permanence in a universe of ceaseless change, famished for meaning, for beauty, for emblems of existence. 

Out of these hungers, out of these contradictions, we make everything that invigorates life with aliveness: our art and our music, our poems and our mathematics, our novels and our loves.

 

 Although you're asleep, everyone's talking to you as though you were awake.

Because they hope you will wake.

In this age of communication, through books, reproductions, exhibits brought from all over the world, who can be free from influence, — preconception? But — it all depends upon what one does with this cross-fertilization: — is it digested, or does it bring indigestion?

 When we see a rose, we immediately say, rose. We do not say, I see a roundish mass of delicately shaded reds and pinks. We immediately pass from the actual experience to the concept.

[…]

We cannot help living to a very large extent in terms of concepts. We have to do so, because immediate experience is so chaotic and so immensely rich that in mere self-preservation we have to use the machinery of language to sort out what is of utility for us, what in any given context is of importance, and at the same time to try to understand—because it is only in terms of language that we can understand what is happening. We make generalizations and we go into higher and higher degrees of abstraction, which permit us to comprehend what we are up to, which we certainly would not if we did not have language. And in this way language is an immense boon, which we could not possibly do without.

But language has its limitations and its traps.