Three phantom keynotes

I started school when I was three. I do not think it was because I was especially gifted but I think my parents wanted me out of the house right away because I asked too many weird questions. For example, I remember being obsessed then of wanting to know why the indentation between our nose and our lips resembled an ashtray’s groove. I used to ask them every day if they already knew the answer to that since I assumed that it was just a matter of time before these wise adults responsible for my birth could enlighten me. I also think my parents feared that I was a lunatic but loved me enough not to tell the neighbors.

I immensely enjoyed going to school for the first time. I savored it to the last ticking hour of the school year. In fact, my small nursery graduation was the only graduation I truly remember. My father wrote my nursery graduation speech, inspired by the Apollo landing on the moon a few years earlier. It was just composed of a few lines. With my little feet on the ground, that speech set my sights on knowing and discovering so much more. That was my own little personal launch to a life of knowing, of discovery. I remember nothing from high school graduation and did not attend graduate school ceremonies. Although college years were filled with rich memories, all I could remember from college graduation was watching a restless bee circle the hairdo of the one seated in front of me. The delivered keynote speech was so boring that it could have lulled a growling bear to sleep in place of a tranquilizer. I think if you have deeply inspiring ideas but are lousy as a speaker, you should consider wearing a Darth Vader costume or have visual aids to help you and your audience from being fixated on other things such as bees.

But maybe I am just not such a fan of ceremonies. I see things much more meaningfully when they occur sub rosa — in the shade of a rose — when there are no intended audiences or no guaranteed mercy applause. So how about a graduation with phantom inspirers as the keynote speakers?  "Phantom" because those speakers will not be standing behind a podium wearing togas but they will be the powerful and enchanting voices of people, living or dead, who would speak of what "knowledge" meant to them as their voices resound in the graduation hall. These phantoms will collectively address the graduates, their mentors and their parents. The following is what I would imagine these phantoms would say, from what I know about their lives and their works.

The Phantoms for Discovery and Imagination (maybe Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman.) "Be interested in everything. Be curious about how the natural world works and even if you know that a mystery may not be solved in your lifetime, try anyway — passionately try. Do not be afraid to walk your mind. It is like the universe; it does not walk into a limit but it creates the space as it expands. We are all born with talents but what we do with them is yet undefined and will be our entire life’s work. So seek where and how you can be most creative. Work hard and set your sights high but pay attention to the little things. On the way to the ‘big’ fundamental discoveries ascribed to us, were small profound instances where we knew just a morsel more from the day before. Intelligence is only liberating if it frees yourself and perhaps others, of ignorance. If not, then it is just overbearing nuisance and therefore a curse, not just to yourself but to others. The pleasure in finding things out is deeper than the recognition by a Nobel committee or any award. Knowing and understanding make living so worthwhile. To work from a desire to discover and imagine how nature, in its many aspects, does its job of creation so well is this endeavor called science — one of the greatest pleasures of being human — worthy of any pursuit spanning entire lifetimes. "

The Phantoms of Embracing Skeletons. "Our skeletons were recently found, locked in a tender embrace under the earth in Verona Italy. The archaeologists called us Romeo and Juliet but we are of course far older than that tale. Unearthing our remains as your generation did, touched you in a special way. It affirmed yet again that love (not just romantic love), like the desire to know, has been the constant feature of this enterprise called human life. And like the desire to know and understand, love leaves traces, even when in the form of bare bones, of its power to move souls and perspectives. Love is that powerful emotion which transforms a mere job to a passionate craft, it is what transforms a teacher into a mentor, an acquaintance to a life-long friend."

"An embrace is a loving acceptance of someone or something. Graduation may be the beginning of your own life-long embrace with your choice of where, how and with whom you will spend the finite hours of your lifetime. Many of you graduates will entertain thoughts of leaving your country and many of you are thinking of staying, too. Whatever you choose, know how to embrace your choice and the consequences of your choice. If you choose to leave, do not remind your people what a treasure of a human being they will miss. If you choose to stay and serve in your own way, do not remind others that you are such a hero for doing so and even enumerate to them the benefits you are foregoing by staying here. Your country is already inhabited by a surplus of public servants who make you feel you owe them because they stayed here to give you the kind of service they do. Your universities no longer need to breed this kind of characters. So be careful to make choices worthy of your embrace. They will define your life and as our bones have shown, even your death."

The Phantom of the Goat Scribbler: On Reading and Writing. "I was the Syrian goat herder, 6,000 years ago, who was just doodling on some stones how many goats I had. One of you, in this age of museum collections, uncovered the stone I doodled on. Your current civilization prints enough words in daily newspapers that could go around the world more than once. Reading is as old as any human desire to understand and share information. Writing and reading enable our expressions of humanity to survive beyond our own lifetimes. When you read an excellent piece of writing, you consider it such not merely because of its style but because the writer’s ability to write is a reflection of the writer’s vast inner library — what the writer has read and understood. When you read, you assert that there is a channel to human understanding that does not require a camera or microphone to be worthwhile. When you read, you write in the slate of your own mind your reflections punctuated by your own understanding. When you read, you acknowledge the march of ideas in history to understand the complexity of human lives and relationships and that despite how dark and murky the present seems to be, somewhere in the silent libraries, there is a breathing lesson of hope for the future of humanity with which we could inspire own breaths. So in engaging humanity between the covers, we read — we live."

Amid the pomp and ceremony that usually marks graduation rites, launch from your graduation seats with these phantom speakers and your own inspirational phantoms. Become more than the outcome of your university curricula, more than an abiding alumni. To be more than what your school has taught you is what real education means. Half of the time, real education means shedding what school has taught you. Discover, read and embrace the larger world with the march of your own minds.

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