My speech to the English majors

Well, another year’s gone by and apparently no one’s asked me to deliver the commencement address at any of the finer universities. No graduations, no convocations. Not so much as a toast to deliver.

What follows is the speech I’d have given to a gathering of English majors, had anyone invited me.

It’s an honor to be here today.

I woulda paused and made some ad lib pleasantries here. Mentioned the Dean by name. Thanked the other speakers and distinguished guests. You know, turned on the natural charm.

Your program notes may have told you that my qualification for this gig was that I ripped off a movie and shoehorned Shakespeare into it. That’s right, I actually monetized my knowledge of Elizabethan literature. Hold your applause.

But that’s just the thing. You face very real, very serious questions about what you celebrate today. Most of which concern the practical value of what you got up to the last four years. There’s something about a degree in English that prompts a strange little question: “What are you going to do with that?” people ask. And they tilt their head a little.

This is unanswerable for a couple of reasons. The first reason is that you don’t really do anything in particular with a degree any more, any more than you do with sleep or breathing. It’s just what you gotta do. This is documented. A bachelor’s is what a high school diploma used to be. In your grandparents’ generation, a degree opened doors. In yours, a degree merely keeps doors from being closed. Subtle difference.

And if you’re attending the kind of school that hands the commencement speech over to me, whose major contribution to academic scholarship is a lovingly sophomoric mash-up, then you’re in real trouble.

But I digress.

The second reason is that quite a lot of you English majors aren’t going to do anything English-major-y. And while you cringe at my gearbox-grinding abuse of the language, consider the part that most people forget: most everyone else runs up against the exact same wall. Chemistry majors don’t all become chemists. Psych majors don’t all become psychologists. No one expects that, that’s ridiculous. Labels don’t dictate reality, and even if we wanted them to, there’s only so much room on the conveyor belt, on the path from A to B.

People understand that without asking… except with English majors.

Who really understands what other people do? Close your eyes. Ask yourself what actually happens in a senior year biology seminar. You know what? I’m picturing the slides from my high school bio class, except, explained in more detail. I’m probably wrong. Ask a fourth-grade kid what a Ph.D. in math does, they’ll shrug and guess that they multiply really big numbers in their head. What do French majors do once they’ve learned all the verbs? There must be more to it than that, right? I don’t know, I wasn’t there.

So the point is that few understand what it means to read the way you do.

I majored in film. I haven’t had to justify it in a long, long time. But if I had, I could spin you some good old-fashioned rationalizations. I have to.

See, there’s a strange mentality that treats education like stats in some Dungeons & Dragons knock-off. That the university is a place where you level up your stats, one at a time, on a skill tree. And the choices and allocations you make now follow some linear arrangement and never the paths may cross. To become a 5th Level Frost Mage, you must first become a 4th Level Frost Mage, and the only folks who get there are Tertiary Frost Acolytes, and God help you if you waste a single precious mana point learning Fire Bolt.

Well, of course, this is crap. Your English-major skills, whatever they may be, extend beyond the scope of your department and have since ‘reading’ stopped being a subject by itself in school. No, you won’t use Percy Bysshe Shelley in everyday life. You knew you wouldn’t.

But people keep asking, keep tilting their heads.

And the insecurity that builds up around this comes in torrents, as we rush to defend ourselves from pre-emptive complaints. And so an astounding bouquet of clichés flutters in, on the value of studying English. “It teaches you how to think,” they say. So does everything. “It makes you a better writer,” they say. Well, that’s great. So you won’t have the skills that the other guy has, but you’ll make yourself sound better. That might work out.

Seriously. “It teaches you how to think.” Because, oh, you know, those other majors, they can’t help you there. You walk into Physics 101 and the first thing the professor writes on the board is, “Fuck thinking!”

Let’s put paid to those shopworn old standbys. Let’s stop playing their game.

You don’t major in English for the four years it takes. You’re a student for life, ‘cause that’s how long it lasts. Right now, let me tell you, you’re screwed. ‘Cause your roommate the math major knows lots about math. And your friend who took Spanish knows Spanish real well.

But if you spent four years on an English degree, I can promise you this: you know jack. You know nothing. ‘Cause four years with John Milton, with Woolf and with Coleridge, John Donne and the Brownings and I’m-just-getting-started, William Tapdancing Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman and Salinger, a little Carl Sandburg, this whole horrible Billy Joelish list song of the Western Canon crammed into four years… well, to quote a great philosopher, “That don’t impress me much.”

Oh, fine, you say, forget the survey courses. Let’s talk seriously. You think you know your favorite author, the one you wrote your thesis on. Well, I’m here to tell you that in five years you’re gonna read your thesis and then you’re gonna read the book or play or whatever you shot your mouth off about, and you’re gonna realize that what you don’t know about that thing could fill libraries.

That’s exciting.

That’s incredible.

Think of it: even with just the old highlighted paperbacks you have now, whatever you couldn’t sell back to the bookstore for pennies on the dollar, you can get more out of them, not less, with every re-read. You’ll get older, you’ll get wiser, and the words will only offer you more. Try that with your economics textbook. You’ve been built to process fractals. Everything you think you know contains a little more to know, and it only goes deeper. You have so far to go. The Canadian poet, Robert W. Service, told us that we could understand every mystery of the universe if we could fully comprehend one grain of sand. And he got that off William Blake, as you English majors know.

Well, there’s just so much sand out there, and you’ve bought yourself some prime real estate on the beach.

That’s your degree in English. It’s your place on the beach with an old striped towel and a big umbrella to keep the sun off. It’s your ticket to a lifelong oceanside rock-and-roll fantasy camp, counseled and administered by dead geniuses you never met. What some squeeze in as a distro you made as a life choice. You go through life powerfully, desperately aware of the breadth of the shoulders you stand on; you understand, acutely, what knowledge and secrets await someone with time to read, and to listen. You feel the sand between your toes.

And when someone comes along and asks what you’re doing, you can tell them, “I don’t know.” Because an education has shown you: there’s a lot of things you don’t know.

These books are the best chance you have to figure out who you are and what you’re doing here, and you need four years’ head start on the rest of the world ‘cause you’re not getting any younger.

And the question never got answered, of course, this question of what you do with your much-ballyhooed degree. Well, fine. Briefly: you go and get a crappy job like a lot of other crappy jobs people have, and you work hard and you try to move onward and upward and eventually people stop asking where you went or what you studied, ‘cause it was all so long ago.

You do the same thing you’d have done if you’d had any other degree, ‘cause you’re still you, and if you really wanted a job with some specific course requirement, you’d have changed your major long ago. There are no frustrated financiers in this room. There are no budding orthodontists or secretive tech geniuses who want so badly to be those things but can’t ‘cause English pays better. No one held a gun to anyone’s head to read the classics. We read them because we want to learn. That’s exciting, like I said. That’s fantastic.

And guess what. When you do get a job, you’ll never refer to it as the job you got with your degree in English. Whether it relates to your field or not. You’ll forget your degree, after all it did for you. Your job just becomes the thing you do, when you get up in the morning. No big deal. And you’ll use what you learned. But you won’t remember you learned it here.

‘Cause by the time you use it, really use it, it’s so much a part of you that you won’t even know when you’re doing it. No one looks at a clock, then sits up in their chair, and says, “Boy, I’m sure glad we learned how to tell time in Miss What’s-Her-Name’s class.” It isn’t a skill. It isn’t a skill at all, what you’ve learned the last four years. It’s your life.

What a life you’ve got waiting for you.

Good luck. Summer’s coming. I will see you by the waves.