"I
should be doing the ritual thing and blessing you with words of wisdom
and encouragement. But the truth is, all I really want to say is thank
you. Thank all of you students who, against all odds and against all the
pressures to do otherwise, have chosen to have a life in the arts. All
the paradigms of success that we routinely encounter in our everyday
lives—on television, in movies, in the online world, in the constant din
of advertising, even from our friends and families—all these “models”
for success and happiness American-style are about what is ultimately a
disposable life, about a life centered around material gain and about
finding the best possible comfort zone for yourself.
But
by choosing a life in the arts you’ve set yourselves apart from all
that and from a nation that has become such a hostage to distraction
that it can’t absorb a single complex thought without having it reduced
to a sound byte. Most people now, and particularly most people your age,
live in a fractured virtual environment where staying focused on a
single thought for, say, a mere seven seconds presents a grave
challenge. (I mention seven seconds because a staff researcher at Google
in San Francisco recently told me that 7.3 seconds was the amount of
time that an average viewer stays on a YouTube site before jumping to
another page.) You have grown up in a world that offers constant, almost
irresistible distraction not unlike what the serpent in the Garden of
Eden offered to Eve when he whispered to her, “check out them apples.”
The
arts, however, are difficult. They are mind-bendingly and refreshingly
difficult. You can’t learn the role of Hamlet (no less write it), you
can’t play the fugue in the Hammerklavier Sonata (no less
compose it) and you can’t hope to move effortlessly through one of Twyla
Tharp’s ballets without having submitting yourself to something that’s
profoundly difficult, that demands sustained concentration and
unyielding devotion. Artists are people who’ve learned how to surrender
themselves to a higher purpose, to something better than their miserable
little egos. They’ve been willing to put their self-esteem in a
Cuisinart and let it be chopped and diced and crushed to a pulp. They
are the ones who’ve learned to live with the brutal fact that God didn’t
dole out talent in fair and equal portions and that the person sitting
next to them may only need to practice only half as hard to win the
concerto competition.
And
the wonderful, astonishing truth is that the arts are utterly useless.
You can’t eat music or poetry or dance. You can’t drive your car on a
sonnet it or wear it on your back to shield you from the elements. This
“uselessness” is why politicians and other painfully literal-minded
people during times of budget crises (which is pretty much all the time
now) can’t wait to single the arts out for elimination. For them
artistic activity is strictly after-school business. They consider that
what we do can’t honestly be compared to the real business of life, that
art is entertainment and ultimately non-essential. They don’t realize
that what we artists offer is one of the few things that make human life
meaningful, that through our skill and our talent and through the way
that we share our rich emotional lives we add color and texture and
depth and complexity to their lives.
A
life in the arts means a life of sacrifice and tens of thousands of
hours of devotion and discipline with scant remuneration and sometimes
even scant recognition. A life in the arts means loving complexity and
ambiguity, of enjoying the fact that there are no single, absolute
solutions. And it means that you value communicating about matters of
the spirit over the baser forms of human interaction, because you know
that life is not just a transaction, not simply a game about winning
someone’s confidence purely for purposes of material gain. ....I am
deeply grateful for your decision..."
