William Blake and the stubborn courage of the unexampled, Radiolab creator Jad Abumrad's stunning commencement address about the meaning of life

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[The Only Valiant Way to Complain Is to Create: William Blake and the Stubborn Courage of the Unexampled]( In the first days of a bleak London December in 1827, a small group of mourners gathered on a hill in the fields just north of the city limits at Bunhill Fields, named for “bone hill,” longtime burial ground for the disgraceful dead. There, in what was now a dissenters’ cemetery, the English Poor Laws had ensured a pauper’s funeral for the man who had died five days earlier in his squalid home and was now being lowered into an unmarked grave. The man whose “Songs of Innocence” would [light the creative spark]( in the young Maurice Sendak’s imagination a century-some later. The man Patti Smith would celebrate as [“the loom’s loom, spinning the fiber of revelation”]( — a guiding sun in the human cosmos of creativity. Those who knew William Blake (November 28, 1757–August 12, 1827) cherished his overwhelming kindness, his capacity for delight even during his frequent and fathomless depressions, his “expression of great sweetness, but bordering on weakness — except when his features are animated by expression, and then he has an air of inspiration about him.” He was remembered for the strange, koan-like things he said about Jesus (He is the only God. And so am I and so are you.), about the prosperous artists who held his poverty as proof of his failure (I possess my visions and peace. They have bartered their birthright for a mess of pottage.), about the nature of creativity (The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way… As a man is, so he sees.) Art from Blake’s First Book of Urizen, 1796. (Available [as a print]( Unseen by his own world, he saw deep into the worlds to come, channeling his visions through anything at hand. It was not the medium that mattered, but its pliancy as he bent it to his vision of the mystery that is itself the message — the message we call art: He was a painter, a poet, a [philosopher without meaning to]( an early prophet of [panpsychism]( a mystic who lived not to solve the mystery but to revel in it, to encode it in verses and etch it onto copper plates and stain it onto canvases and seed it into souls for centuries to come. As an artist, he was resolutely his own standard, his own guiding sun. [Like Beethoven]( with whom he shared a death-year and the stubborn unwillingness to compromise on the artistic vision he experienced as life, Blake was determined to make what he wanted to make and to make it on his own terms — in a world unready for the art and unfriendly to the terms. There is no greater act of creative courage than this. Another engraving from [Blake’s Paradise Lost](. And so, centuries before the technologies existed to enable the proof, William Blake became the first living conjecture of the [1,000 True Fans theory](. He knew what we all eventually realize, if we are awake and courageous enough: that the best way — and the only effective way — to complain about the way things are is to make new and better things, untested and unexampled things, things that spring from the gravity of creative conviction and drag the status quo like a tide toward some new horizon. Poverty is no friend to the creative spirit, nor to this artist who knew that “Man has no body distinct from his Soul for that called Body is a portion of Soul.” To feed the body, Blake worked long wearying hours as an engraver for hire, squinting at sheets of copper to scratch and cross-hatch shapes onto them in intricate patterns of dots and lines. [“Engraving is Eternal work,”]( he sighed to a client who grumbled that a project was taking too long. “The Child Mary Shelley (at her Mother’s Death).” Engraving from William Blake’s commission to illustrate feminism founding mother Mary Wollstonecraft’s [book of moral education for children](. All the while, Blake’s mind bustled and bloomed with the transcendent chaos of his own ideas. He pressed the plates onto white paper, watching the ink held in the tiny canals of the etchings render stark yet delicate black-and-white shapes, alive with light and shadow. It was beautiful, but it was intensely toilsome — he could barely make a living illustrating other people’s work, and it left no time for his own art. He yearned for a different technique that could achieve the same result in less time and with less toil. No such technique existed. So he invented it. Rather than cut the shapes onto the plates with his sharp steel burin, he painted directly onto the copper with a quill or brush dipped in acid-resistant varnish, then bathed the plates in acid, which stripped a layer of the surface to revealed the embossed shape of what he had drawn. A complaint made in chemistry and creative restlessness. It came to him, he said, as a message from his dead brother’s spirit. Jacob’s Dream by William Blake, 1805. (Available [as a print]( as [stationery cards]( and [as a face mask]( The new technique gave Blake full creative freedom and full control of production. Suddenly, he could combine text and image on a single page, in a single process, which neither traditional engraving nor etching could do — both required separate space for lettering and a second production pass for type-setting the words. There was only one challenge with his invention: Because the print was still made by pressing a plate onto a page, any text he painted onto the plate was printed backward. So he learned mirror-writing. Art from Blake’s First Book of Urizen, 1796. Suddenly, William Blake had unfettered himself from the production machine, giving his creative might free rein. His new process, he estimated, enabled him to make what he wanted to make for a quarter of the cost. He was a one-man operation, creating in his own space and with his own hands what ordinarily took entire teams of artisans and craftsmen, each with different training, using different tools, working in different workshops. Centuries before zines, before blogs, before Instagram, before Substack, William Blake had built himself an autonomous platform on which to share his creative labors, exactly as he wanted them to live. The magnitude of his innovation was not lost on Blake. In 1793, he composed and printed his Prospectus, addressed “TO THE PUBLIC,” in which he announced that he had “invented a method of Printing both Letter-press and Engraving in a style more ornamental, uniform, and grand, than any before discovered.” It was nothing less than a manifesto for creative self-liberation: The Labours of the Artist, the Poet, the Musician, have been proverbially attended by poverty and obscurity; this was never the fault of the Public, but was owing to a neglect of means to propagate such works as have wholly absorbed the Man of Genius. Even Milton and Shakespeare could not publish their own works. […] If a method of Printing which combines the Painter and the Poet is a phenomenon worthy of public attention, provided that it exceeds in elegance all former methods, the Author is sure of his reward. In [William Blake vs. the World]( ([public library]( — the best book on Blake in the seven decades since [Alfred Kazin’s masterpiece]( — John Higgs captures just how radical this was, both as a technology of creation and as an ethos: Eighteenth-century printing was a complex job which involved many specialist tradesmen. One person wrote the book, another was responsible for editing it, and a third typeset the text. An artist designed illustrations for an engraver to produce, and a printer put each page through the press, once for text and a second time for the images. On occasions, these would be hand-coloured by another specialist, and finally a bookseller would sell the finished book. Thanks to Blake’s new technique, he had the ability to do all these tasks himself. He was a one-person publishing industry, writing, designing, printing and colouring illustrated works of his own devising. Although he was still in the Georgian era, Blake was practising the “do it yourself” ethos of punk rock. Art from Blake’s America: A Prophecy, 1793. (Available [as a print]( and as [stationery cards]( Here is where a cynic or a Silicon Valley entrepreneur might scoff, So what? He died a pauper. And here is where Blake would wince back, as he did in a letter, I should be sorry if I had any earthly fame, for whatever natural glory a man has is so much detracted from his spiritual glory. Precisely because he was his own standard, because he wanted to make exactly what he wanted to make, it was enough for him that a handful of [devoted fans]( became his collectors and commissioned [work]( he was inspired to make. It was just about enough to live on. And it was never what he lived for. (Centuries later, this ethos — which I believe is the natural state of the creative spirit — still raises eyebrows as radicalism.) In the very act of this choice, he was modeling a kind of moral beauty that reached beyond art, into life itself — an unwillingness to accept the limitations imposed upon any present by the momentum of its past, a winged willingness to do whatever it takes to transcend them, which begins with a new way of seeing: seeing the limitations and seeing the alternate possibilities. For the Eye altering alters all. Art from Blake’s America: A Prophecy, 1793. (Available [as a print]( and as [stationery cards]( Higgs writes: Blake’s politics… existed in what he created. He may have had great empathy with the poor, but he did not spend his days working to better their situation. Instead, he believed that the imagination was the tool needed to improve society, and… would do more to liberate people than canvassing or protesting. To do this would take integrity, self-belief, and effort. It is here that we find the strongest expression of Blake’s politics. True politics are not ideologies to discuss, but an attitude to your relationship with the world which is enacted in your daily life. Your politics are not what you tell yourself you believe. They are not the set of ideas that you identify with, or look to for personal validation of your goodness as a human being. Your politics are expressed in the choices that you make, the way you treat other people, and the actions you perform. It is here that hypocrisy and vanity fall away, as the reality of your politics is revealed in the countless decisions that you make every day. Who you work for, whether you volunteer for charity work, if you become a landlord, whether you eat meat, the extent to which you pursue money and consumer goods — these are the types of decisions in which our true politics are expressed… Blake needed commercial engraving work to keep a roof over his head. But he also needed to be free of compromise when it came to his own work. He produced his art as an individualist antinomian, asking no permission, answering to nobody. “Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing” by William Blake, circa 1796, from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (Available [as a print]( Blake himself put it both beautifully and bluntly: There cannot be more than two or three great Painters or Poets in any Age or Country; and these, in a corrupt state of Society, are easily excluded, but not so easily obstructed. For an uncompromising counterpart in music, revisit the story of [how Beethoven made his “Ode to Joy,”]( then savor Esperanza Spalding’s [soulful strings-and-voice rendition]( of Blake’s short existentialist poem “The Fly” and this [lovely vintage picture-book]( celebrating his uncommon legacy. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( on Facebook]( donating=loving Every month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For sixteen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference. monthly donation You can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch.  one-time donation Or you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. [Start Now]( [Give Now]( Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 Need to cancel an existing donation? (It's okay — life changes course. I treasure your kindness and appreciate your support for as long as it lasted.) You can do so [on this page](. [The Sea and the Soul: Poet, Painter, and Philosopher Etel Adnan on the Elemental Blues of Being]( “It is a general sense of the poetry of existence that overcomes me. Often it is connected with the sea,” the young Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary a century ago as she reckoned with the “extraordinary emotions” that often overcame her — [the source]( from which some of humanity’s greatest literature was about to spring. Half a century later, the protagonist of Iris Murdoch’s [exquisite existentialist novel]( The Sea, the Sea gasped: “The sea. I could fill a volume simply with my word-pictures of it.” Another epoch later, the painter, poet, and philosopher Etel Adnan (February 24, 1925–November 14, 2021) filled with exquisite existentialist word-pictures her slender, splendid volume [Sea & Fog]( ([public library]( — a suite of quickenings and questions: unanswerable, perhaps unaskable, but beautiful for the momentum by which they impel us to go on asking, the momentum we call life. The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Japanese artist Hokusai, 1831. (Available [as a print]( and [as a face mask]( benefitting The Nature Conservancy.) Having explored [the mountain as a lens on the soul]( and [night as a lens on the self]( Adnan turns her oracular mind to the sea: The sea. Nothing else. Walls ruptured. Sea. Water tumbling. […] Dryness peels away the soul caught in gravity’s unconquerable solitude. The body’s magnetized metals turn naturally North. The face, with eyes, mouth and nostrils, strains to remember intricate mental constructions. Bones end dust over dust. A generation after Rachel Carson watched “earth becoming fluid as the sea itself” in her reflection on [the ocean and the meaning of life]( Adnan writes: The sea’s instincts collaborate with ours to create thinking. Our thoughts come and go, in birth and evanescence. We feel we own them but we’re the ones to belong to the radiations that they are, lighter than fog, but endearing in their unreliability. […] Sea, made of instants chained. Where to shelter impermanence within its defenses? A threat, for sure. What about the permanent affinity between light and mind, both a processing machine, of particles, of thoughts? Painting by Etel Adnan from [Etel Adnan: Light’s New Measure]( Guggenheim Museum, 2021. (Photograph: Maria Popova) She reflects on how we bask in “the soft happiness that invades the spirit when water meets light” and at the same time find ourselves “exasperated by water’s alarming coherence” — an echo of the great Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd, who captured this bipolar enchantment a generation earlier as she [contemplated the might and mystery of water]( on the edge of a rushing river near its mountain source: “The most appalling quality of water is its strength. I love its flash and gleam, its music, its pliancy and grace, its slap against my body; but I fear its strength.” For Adnan, this vital tension between violence and serenity, between uncertainty and coherence, is the element’s nature — the very aspect of the sea that speaks to the elemental in us: Let your back lie on the water and be a raft for birds, then in the middle of the night, dive. Your ears will ring, spit fire; the waters will remember that once they were you. Elements. Elemental… And we are here, anywhere, so long as space would be. Is given to us sea/ocean, sea permanent revelation; open revelation of itself, to itself. Mind approximates those lit lines in the front, that darkness above, meant not to understand but to penetrate, to silence itself while heightening its power, to reach vision in essential unknowing. In her orphic voice, she adds: Look well at the Pacific before you die. The best of the promised paradises have neither its hues nor its splendor. Spring Moon at Ninomiya Beach, 1931 — one of Hasui Kawase’s [stunning vintage Japanese woodblocks](. (Available [as a print]( In a passage evocative of that immortal line from The Little Prince — [“What is essential is invisible to the eye.”]( — Adnan writes: For seeing the sea it’s sometimes better to close one’s eyes. […] The sea is to be seen. See the sea. Wait. Do not hurry. Do not run to her. Wait, she says. Or I say. See the sea. Look at her using your eyes. Open them, those eyes that will close one day when you won’t be standing. You will be flat, like her, but she will be alive. Therefore look at her while you can. Let your eyes tire and burn. Let them suffer. Keep them open like one does at midday. Don’t worry. Other eyes within will take over and go on seeing her. They will not search for forms nor seek divine presence. They will rather continue to see water which stirs and shouts, becomes ice in the North, vapor in the tropics. […] Eyes have busied themselves exclusively with seeing although they can hear better than ears whenever they join forces with what’s outside the mind’s perimeter. A century after Whitman bellowed into the New York flood-tide that [the body is the soul]( and Melville wrote in Moby-Dick that “all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea,” Adnan adds: Without a body there’s no soul and without the latter there’s no way to speak about the sea. Complement [Sea & Fog]( — the other half of which brings Adnan’s singular lens to the mystique of the mist — with her deathbed meditation on [how to live and how to die]( then revisit two centuries of great writers [reflecting on the color blue](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( on Facebook]( [The Human Kaleidoscope and the Unwritten Story of the World: “Radiolab” Creator Jad Abumrad’s Superb Caltech Commencement Address]( Beginnings are a beautiful thing — beautiful and terrifying, marked by the wonder of the possible and the weight of the possible. A beginning is a singular kind of freedom — a vector reaching toward a nebulous infinity of possible endings, yet bound to spear only one; a vector haunted by the knowledge that every littlest step taken along it takes us one way and not another, even the steps we don’t realize we are taking — which, in a reality [governed primarily by chance]( are most steps. And as James {NAME} — who [uniquely understood our delusions about chance and choice]( — bellows down the hallway of time to remind us, “nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.” Because the true beginning of our lives is obscured behind the horizon of conscious memory and swaddled in complete lack of agency, different cultures and civilizations have designated various points along the path as the proper beginning of independent life — none more momentous, in this particular culture, than the point at which we leave the safety of the family cocoon and the structure educational system, and leap into the open sky of independence (itself a notion that is, as the pandemic has rudely reminded us, [another delusion of our species](. To embolden the leap, our culture has devised one particularly beloved packet of instructions: the commencement address. From Radiolab creator, composer, and all-around golden human Jad Abumrad comes an especially fine addition to [the finest of the genre]( his address to the graduating Caltech class of 2022 — a gorgeous meditation on the Rube Goldberg machine of accidents that make each and every existence possible: that rosary of randomness leading to any one life, beaded with chance events stretching all the way to the Big Bang (and [possibly beyond it]( of which we can only ever glimpse a handful of beads on the nano-scale of a few human generations in our ancestry. Jad’s father (third from left) with siblings. At the heart of Jad’s singularly personal story — which is also the universal story — is a reminder that these accidents of chance render the choices we make with our lives all the more meaningful, all the more urgent: a sort of cosmic duty to recompense the universe for the unbidden gift of our lives as we ourselves come to bead the rosary of the future. Jad’s great-grandfather, Brazil, 1890s. Jad begins the address with a short guided meditation into presence — the single bead of being we ever touch directly. I find in it a poignant meta-testament to why a great commencement address is such a powerful gift for any life-stage — not only the outset of adulthood: A kernel of all meditation traditions is the idea that, whenever you find yourself hijacked by thought and distracted by story during meditation, you can “begin again.” It is what saves a practice. It is also, when applied to the practice of living, what can save a life. Commence again. Any day. Jad’s grandfather, grandmother, and father (first from left) with siblings. Jad has kindly shared with me the transcript, along with a wondrous private portal of time travel through the family photo album, folded into which — as into any personal history — is a fragment of world-history bridging epochs, cultures, and interwoven fates. Hello, my friends! It’s a great, great honor for me to be here with you guys today — particularly meaningful because I know this is the first one of these, live, in a couple of years. OK, let’s take stock: It’s 10:28 AM, June 10, 2022. Do me a favor: Close your eyes for a second. Call into your consciousness a fast-cutting montage of the 120 million seconds of your educational experience that have led you to this moment. Bring it into your mind: The pandemic waves. The gut-wrenching reckonings. The friendships. The papers. The Zooms. The masks. The readings. The labs. All of it — call it to mind. Now, eyes still closed, feel the air around you — that very particular stultifyingly hot Southern California air — on your cheeks; feel the heat building up between your head and your cap; feel the pressure of the chair on your butt. That feeling right there, of the air and the pressure? That is the feeling of all it about to be behind you. It’s the feeling of you, on the brink, about to cross over. OK, open your eyes. Thank for indulging me in that meditative moment (part of which was lovingly borrowed from my pal Robert Krulwich). When I was first asked to deliver the commencement address, I was a little scared. I didn’t think I was up to it. You all are about to graduate from one of the top colleges the country. You’ve already weathered a singularly difficult moment in human history: What could I possibly say to you, as you stand on the brink, that resembles wisdom? And then I thought, perhaps that’s the point: There is a void out there. Looming. For all of you. That void is called tomorrow. What will happen tomorrow? What will happen the day after tomorrow? I imagine some of you are already terrified of this. If you’re not, I bow to you, but perhaps in a few months, when it’s time to go back to college and you realize, Oh damn, there’s no college to go back to. There’s just life — the string of days that is my life, one after another, until I die. Maybe then, in that moment, you’ll have that feeling of Uh-oh: What. Now. What do I do? I would like to address this existential question and the angst it presents. (I feel a little bit of that angst looming in the air, commingling with the heat.) I brought two pictures with me to help: I brought a picture of my grandfather — you can’t see this, but just imagine me but with an Arab Man Mustache, sepia — and I brought a picture of a monarch butterfly. I bring them as offerings to you, as spirit-guides on your journey. In 1915, my grandfather was about ten. He lived in a village called Waidi Shahrour, which is in the mountains of Lebanon. It’s just him and his two brothers and his mom. His dad — my great-grandpa — had gone off to Brazil to find some work. But then he’d gotten trapped there, because this was WWI and the entire country was blockaded — you had the Allied Forces (let’s call them) on one side, and then the Germans on the other — and nothing or no one was allowed in or out. So the entire country was starving. It’s a pretty small country — 400,000 people. 200,000 had died. This is now referred to as the Great Famine of Mount Lebanon. So: My grandfather is a little boy, as I said. And his mom — my great-grandma — has to feed the family. So she decides on this plan, where every week, she, my grandpa, and his two brothers would get produce from their village, and they’d pack it into carts, and they’d walk up and over thirty-five miles of snow-covered mountain, and back down to where the Germans were stationed, and then they would sell their produce to the German army, and in exchange get wheat and flour and dried milk and other things, which they’d pack into carts, drag thirty-five miles the other direction, up and over the mountains, back near their village, where the Allied soldiers were stationed, and then they’d trade that stuff with them. And that’s how they survived: They traded supplies between the enemies that occupied their country. It’s a particularly Lebanese existence. And they made this trip once a week, every week, on foot: thirty-five miles one way, thirty-five miles back. Well, one day, on the return leg of one of these journeys, my great-grandma — my grandpa’s mom — stops, clutches her chest, falls over, and dies. So there’s my grandfather — a ten-year-old boy — staring into a void. What the hell do you do in that moment? I imagine him looking at his mom, his two brothers, and the carts full of grains and dried milk that still had to be traded or else they’d starve. And he just knew. Somewhere inside of him, there was now a deep understanding. The tectonic plates of him had realigned. So what did he do? He buried his mom on the side of the road. And kept on walking. He was ten. Now, he would eventually have a moment to actually process this — when he was seventy, he’d return to that spot on the side of the road and weep for an hour — but, at the time, he just kept walking. Now fast-forward, and he has a family of his own, one of whom was my dad. And he works three jobs to ensure that my dad would go to university. My dad did not want to go to university, but my grandfather said, You are damned well going to go to university and you are damned well going to be a doctor. Because nobody in the village of five thousand people had ever done that. So my dad went to university, met my mom, they come to America — again, another first for the village — and, there, they had me: this nerdy kid who would go on to make a show called Radiolab. And here I am. There are times when I’m walking down the street in New York, just feeling the force of the earth on my feet, and the sheer improbability of this chain of events stops me in my tracks: None of this had to be. I was not inevitable. You are all not inevitable. You did not have to be here. I certainly didn’t have to be there, because I wouldn’t even exist, were it not for a ten-year-old boy who had to bury his mother on the side of the road. Why am I telling you this? Because here we are. This is a happy moment — not a sad moment! But it is one of those moments where everything is about to change for you. Where the future is more unknowable and unconquerable than you can possibly fathom. And I don’t mean this in a generic sense: It seems to me that it’s your generation’s particular inheritance to be faced with things that are too big, too much, too overwhelming. The planet is on fire — my generation has failed you in that regard. Democracies are on fire. There’s a plague of misinformation — again, we’ve let you down. Oh, there’s an actual plague — not sure what we could have done about that, but we probably let you down there, too. Point is, like that young boy in 1915, circumstances have left you with not a whole lot choice but to put one foot in front of the other and walk into whatever is next. And if I have any wisdom to offer you, it’s this: You don’t have to fully comprehend anything now. All you have to do is walk. Just set yourself in motion, and let go of everything else. And as graduates of Caltech, you are in a position, more than most, to know the awesome gravity of the void you are walking into. The gift, and the curse, of the scientific mind is to know that every time we presume to see the whole of something, the plane of reality will tilt to reveal new mysteries — here I’m [quoting]( from a writer friend, Maria Popova — and when reality does that tilt, we’re always “staggered with the sudden sense that we had been looking at only a fragment. The history of our species is the history of learning and forgetting and relearning this elemental truth.” You all know this. You’re the ones who have the clearest sense that there is so much we do not know. But as graduates of Caltech, you are also the ones with the greatest ability to see possibility in that void. To walk into it and discover and create and build the unimaginable. And one of the wonderful things about my grandfather’s story, to me — and the reason I offer it to you — is that you do not know how the story will end. My grandfather could not have fathomed a world where people download packages of audio data called podcasts through the air onto things called smartphones, and that someone could possibly make a living doing this. If he were here next to me right now, think of all of the things I would have to explain to him for that last sentence to make sense to him. And yet, he helped create it all. And here I’ll quote the final words of the science fiction series The Expanse: “You will never know the effect you will have on someone, not really. It doesn’t matter if you know. The universe will never tell you if you are right or wrong. You just have to try.” It’s a little humbling, that thought. But I find there’s also a comfort in this way of thinking, in that it’s not just up to you. Which brings me to my second picture. Preparing for this commencement, I learned a startling fact: The monarch butterflies that you sometimes see here in Los Angeles, they migrate about 3,000 miles from Vancouver Canada to Michoacán Mexico — that we knew. What I didn’t know was that each leg of that journey takes the monarchs three to four generations. (Apparently, researchers just learned this.) Three to four generations, each way. Think about that: A new butterfly takes flight from a eucalyptus tree in Vancouver. By the time the butterflies get here, to Los Angeles, that mother butterfly is gone, her child is gone, and her child’s child is now doing the flying. By the time they make it to Mexico, it’s the child’s child’s child. It is unsettling, to see yourself as just one particle in a stream. One butterfly in a kaleidoscope. (Did you know that groups of butterflies are called a kaleidoscope? Isn’t that cool? I didn’t know this until, uh, yesterday?) And the thing is, you might not be the first butterfly. You won’t know it, but you might be the third — or, more likely, the three-hundredth. Taking the work and the knowledge and the discoveries of those that came before you. And, in your life time, you are going to move it forward in ways no one could have imagine. And you’re not going to get all the way. And that’s OK. Because without your effort, humanity is never going to get there. So, to conclude: I wish you all so much luck, so much fierceness, as you take flight tomorrow. And the next day. And the next. All of us old people up here — myself included — are counting on you. But we’re also with flying you. You know, looking back on my early twenties, I remember feeling that my story was singularly mine to write. I now see I’m part of a larger flow. And stepping up here, to this podium, I said to myself, C’mon, grandpa. It’s time. He’s up here with me. The whole village is up here with me. And all of us, we fly with you tomorrow — a human kaleidoscope. So: Let’s do this, butterflies. Let’s change the future. Jad’s grandfather (top left) and father (boy with flowers, front center) with friends and family in their mountain village. Complement with Rachel Carson’s [deathbed letter about the monarch butterflies and the meaning of life]( — one of the most beautiful love letters ever written — and her own [spectacular commencement address about how to save a world]( addressing not only one particular graduating class but the generations of the future she never lived to see and of which we are now a part, then revisit Jad’s [tender poetry-fomented tribute to his mother]( who spent thirty-five years — more than 150 monarch butterfly generations — unpuzzling a single protein. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( on Facebook]( donating=loving Every month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For sixteen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. 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