This Is Us
A Pandemic Commencement
The world may be on pause, but your life isn’t (and other thoughts for the class of coronavirus)
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For Sophia.
There’s a young writer I correspond with who was to have graduated college this month. She’d planned to move to New York City this summer, where she hoped she would finally meet the kinds of people she wanted to talk with about literature, art, and ideas. I’d put her in contact with a few people I thought might be able to help her with jobs or internships, even offered her a couch to crash on if she needed a base camp to find an apartment. Then the pandemic came, obliterating all plans and ambitions, wiping the calendar clean. Within days, all her friends were unceremoniously dispersed, with no time for goodbyes, graduation canceled, and her move postponed indefinitely. Instead, she’s moving back in with her parents (it still gives me an empathetic shudder, 35 years after I left home) and was recently turned down for a job at the local Ralph’s. All the psychic momentum she’d gathered to propel herself across the country to the capital of the publishing world and launch her literary career is guttering out into inertia, despondency.
It’s a hard time for all of us, but perhaps especially for young people, who feel as if their future has been canceled. I decided that what my young friend needed, along with all the other young people who’ve been denied the public ritual of a graduation ceremony, was a commencement address. It was a challenging assignment: to find something encouraging, maybe even inspiring, to say to a young person in a time of plague, economic depression, and decline, without being dishonest or cloying. Also, I have never once been invited to give a commencement speech, not even by my old high school, so I thought it might be a healing exercise for all of us.
If it’s any consolation, the post-graduation world would probably offer you about as much opportunity and promise if there weren’t a pandemic. I know that if some mass disaster had shut down society on the eve of my own college graduation, I would have secretly welcomed it as an enormous relief, like a kid whose math test got canceled by 9/11. I had no idea what I was going to do after graduation — no, really: none — and…
