Commencement exercises for the Class of 2012, Westminster Central Hall, Friday, 15 June

Address by Roger Cohen, ASL parent, and columnist for and International Herald Tribune

Faculty, parents, guests and above all graduates, good morning! It is an honor to be with you here today.

I salute you, class of 2012, you are survivors. You’ve survived the land of “Mind the Gap” and “mushy peas” and “Orange Juice with bits” and “sunny spells” that are marginally longer than “sunny intervals” (or perhaps it is vice-versa). I won’t get into sunny interludes. You’ve survived “tossers,” “bonkers” and “Chavs” and the heinous letter “haitch.”

No worries, you’re done and dusted, you’re sorted. You’ve kept calm and carried on!

But I know, with the joy of this day looms the sorrow of partings, with the lift of the new comes the loss of the familiar, with the thrill of moving on goes the trepidation of moving out. Life is double-edged, an affair of light and shadow. This is your commencement, a beginning that is also an end.

Perhaps you feel ready, or perhaps not quite. Do not flinch. Life will throw you curve balls; they are the most satisfying to hit out the park. As Henry James, your fellow transatlanticist, put it, “Live all you can, it’s a mistake not to.”

Remember the words of Henry V at Agincourt to the French emissary: “We would not seek a battle as we are….Nor as we are, we say, we will not shun it.” And victory was his.

******

I always wanted to tell stories. Wherever I was stories formed in my mind – of people, situations, nations. Somewhere deep inside you there is your essence, the thing that makes you tick. Everyone has something that makes them tick. The thing is it’s often well hidden. Your psyche builds layers of protection around your most vulnerable traits, which may be very closely linked to that precious essence. Distractions are also external: money, fame, peer pressure, parental expectation. So it may be more difficult than you think to recognize the spark that is your personal sliver of the divine. But do so.

Nothing in the end will give you greater satisfaction – not wealth, not passion, not faith, not even love – for if, as Rilke wrote, all companionship is but “the strengthening of two neighboring solitudes,” you have to solve the conundrum of your solitude. No success, however glittering, that denies yourself will make you happy in the long run. So listen to the voice from your soul, quiet but insistent, and honor it. Find what you thrill to: if not the perfect sentence, the beautiful cure, the brilliant formula, the lovely chord, the exquisite sauce, the artful reconciliation. Strive not for everything money can buy but for everything money can’t buy.

Luck – you need some – enabled me to tell stories and live by that. I have been a bearer of witness. Terrible things happen. They must be recorded. Without memory, impunity reigns. When, in 2009, I got back to New York from Tehran, where I had witnessed the brutal smashing of a popular uprising, I wrote:

“To bear witness means being there – and that’s not free. No search engine gives you the smell of a crime, the tremor in the air, the eyes that smolder, or the cadence of a scream.

“No news aggregator tells of the ravaged city exhaling in the dusk, nor summons the defiant cries that rise into the night. No miracle of technology renders the lip-drying taste of fear. No algorithm captures the hush of dignity, nor evokes the adrenalin rush of courage coalescing, nor traces the fresh raw line of a welt.”

******

Every good story is also an adventure. About four decades ago, just across the way, I wandered out my high school – I don’t recall anything resembling a graduation – and with Oxford University nine months off I got a job driving a van for a carpet salesman who turned out to be a swindler. Then, with a couple of friends, I bought a VW Kombi that had been a West German postal van, daubed “PigPen” on the front in homage to the keyboardist of the , and, like any self-respecting 17- year-old hippie in the early 1970s, set off for the Orient.

A couple of pretty girls were hitchhiking near Elephant and Castle. “Where are you going?” they asked. “New Delhi,” we declared. “Wow,” they purred and hopped in. Twenty miles down the highway, with Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh plucking stars from the galaxy on the soon-to-be- stolen tape deck, the engine blew. In short order the girls were gone. Instead of spending our first night with girl, Gauloise and Gainsbourg in a Paris bistro, we spent it down, damp and dismal in Canterbury youth hostel. Humiliation seldom tasted more bitter.

So began a journey that took us as far as Kabul and the ancient Buddhas of Bamiyan (since blown up by the Taliban), but not to Delhi; dysentery stopped us short of the Kyber Pass. The King was deposed in a coup while I was in , my first brush with violent upheaval, although I confess my faculties were not at their keenest.

I have a few regrets. For example, if we’d known about changing the oil we might not have blown a second engine in the Hindu Kush. And if we’d consulted a guide book we might not have breezed straight past some of the world’s great monuments in Greece, Turkey and . Santa Sofia? Catch you later.

Still there is lot to be said for a journey without maps even – or perhaps especially – in today’s world where devices keep you in their crosshairs. It’s important to embark on the unmapped journey from time to time, to embrace mystery, seek wonderment, drink experience unfiltered by hyper-connection. To grasp and evoke place – which is what journalists do – involves shunning distraction.

Let your longings breathe. Gaze with patience. Listen through silences. Look around the next corner. Trust the flutter of intuition. Shun Nexus for nature. Hear the universe’s murmur. Indulge your imagination. Follow your heart’s compass, that great demolisher of conventional wisdom, into the unknown. As T.S. Eliot, whose end was his beginning, put it: “Love is most nearly itself when here and now cease to matter.”

*****

The here and now into which you step today is a troubled one. Jobs are scarce. Debt is not. Inequality grows. In the United States, anxiety stalks the land. Many families are hurting. There is a Renaissance but it is elsewhere: in Brazil and China and India, the coming powers of your futures. Life is flux, a story of rise and fall. The West is no exception. once reprimanded me for flying Business Class…..and ordered me to go First. Those caviar-filled days are gone. Gosh, they were pleasurable.

Yet opportunity abounds. You stand at the cusp. A revolution has eclipsed distance. This global world is still there for the making. Oliver Wendell Holmes had good advice: “As life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time, at the peril of being judged not to have lived.” I covered the Arab Spring last year in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya – the greatest wave of liberation since communism fell in 1989 – and saw first-hand how social media allied to courage can cohere to topple despots. Connectivity opens doors. Networks undo the fear on which repression depends. Stalin could never have resisted Twitter.

But, you will tell me, you just urged us to be wary of digital hyper- connection: life, as I said, is double-edged, one step forward, half-step back. History enlightens; it can also blind. Technology liberates; it can also enslave. Life’s ambiguities and demi-shades comprise a portion of its beauty. Wisdom is also nuance.

You are stepping into a world of less hunger, more access, richer choice, increased longevity and greater awareness than seemed conceivable at my non-graduation. I don’t think I knew what sushi was until I was 25. The inconceivable happens: You can even get a decent latte in Culver, Indiana these days. Great frontiers remain, not least the human brain itself: it is your generation that will decode the mind, just as it will fall to you to reinvent how we power this planet and make sense of 100-year lives.

Possibility becomes reality through character. Sure as there are acorns beneath the oak tree you’ll make mistakes. Think of them as the building blocks of your character. I believe you are privileged in a way you may find surprising: you have absorbed, at an impressionable age, the gifts of the transatlantic community, that cornerstone of liberty. In October 1647, at the height of the English Civil War, Thomas Rainsborough warned right here in this city: “The poorest he that is in hath a life to live as the greatest he…every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government.” There you have it: government of the people, by the people, for the people. Never take it for granted, this Anglo-American gift. Work to extend it further still across the world. Millions have died for it. Your footsteps fall on the soil of their sacrifice. As Lincoln knew, this gift of freedom and democracy is worth your “last full measure of devotion.”

I am a journalist. I believe in a free press and the rule of law as essential foundations of freedom. Without a free press the mighty are corrupted and face no censure; doors are broken down deep in the night and people vanish never to be seen again. I have known such disappearances and felt in mothers’ tears their indelible scar. Open debate is what holds governments accountable and allows society to advance. A Frenchman had it right: “I may disagree with what you say, but I would defend to the death your right to say it.”

Civilized dissent is the mark of any healthy society, just as it is the mark of the education you have received and will soon extend. You’ve learned to demand answers from authority. Never stop doing that.

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In every journey there’s a short story and, mutatis mutandis, every story is a journey. I started out filing by telex from Beirut’s Commodore Hotel, once well described as a functioning telex machine surrounded by 500 broken toilets. I was a correspondent in Brazil in the 1980s. We’d read the local papers in the morning, find something worth filing, and adjourn to a boozy lunch at which the toast was: “Yesterday’s news, today’s story!”

Now the Internet demands updates of correspondents every couple of hours, filing is instantaneous, and tomorrow’s news is today’s story. Change hurtles. I imagine before too long some chip embedded in your forearm will wire words formulating in your brain directly to the electronic page.

But some things don’t change. A saying has it that youth is wasted on the young. I don’t agree. Your energy is the force of the world. Jim Morrison of the Doors had it right: “The old get old and the young get stronger….They got the guns but we got the numbers. Gonna win, yeah we’re takin’ over…Your ballroom days are over, baby.”

I feel your energy, see it in your faces, and I know it will be transformative. There is much to be done. Facebook has not banished poverty and suffering from the face of the earth, nor fed the hungry child, nor ended the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I am a Jew. I was not raised as a Jew but the more I looked at the past, looked at my family, looked in the mirror and looked into others’ eyes, the more that is what I felt myself to be in my skin and in my soul. And traveling the world as a journalist, as the eternal outsider, the bearer of witness, I have come to my own sense of what is most precious in Jewish ethics and teaching.

I think of Rabbi Hillel after the destruction of the Temple: "What is hateful to yourself, do not do to your fellow man. That is the whole Torah; the rest is just commentary.” Or that phrase repeated 36 times in the Mosaic books…You were exiled in order to know what it feels like to be an exile. Put another way, are to treat well the stranger for “you were a stranger in a strange land.” We are required to identify with the outsider who comes knocking on the door as the wind howls. Tikkun Ulam is the Jewish watchword. Repair the world. Be a light unto nations.

To me these are not Judaic lessons, they are universal lessons for humankind. We all fall short, nations as individuals. Yet we must continue to strive. My beloved son, Blaise – Paris-born, Berlin-touched, New York-stamped, and -refined – is among you today. He just gave a farewell party at our house with his close friend Aboudi al-Qattan. To me nothing could better symbolize what ASL stands for than this joint party hosted by Jewish and Palestinian families – Sima and Hani joining Frida and me – to place the promise of the future over the hurt of the past. And we stand today, remember, in the building where the United Nations first gathered.

Go forth then in search of beauty and love, truth and peace. If you take one thing from England, I’d choose its greatest quality: stoicism. Don’t grumble, don’t whine, make deeds count. Recall Czeslaw Milosz’s solemn words: “You who harmed an ordinary man/ Do not feel safe. The poet remembers./You may kill him – another will be born./ Deeds and words shall be recorded.”

Your promise fills me with awe. Life is renewal, a blossoming drawn from deep roots. The Chinese know about the perennial flowering of ancient wisdom and they say: “If you want to be happy for a day, get drunk; a week, kill a pig; a month, get married; for life, be a gardener.”

Cultivate your garden, the inner as the outer. Make it bloom. Set a table for a feast. Tell stories. And invite the stranger in.