By Charles Wheelan
Modeled on Charles Wheelan’s 2011 type Day Speech at Dartmouth university, this selection of refreshingly sincere suggestion and observations is the antidote to these cotton-candy platitudes which are all too widely used to a person who’s ever worn a mortarboard. Armed with a PhD in public coverage, decades of expertise in social technological know-how learn, and—perhaps so much important—good-natured humor, Wheelan bargains up 10½ head-turning aphorisms on happiness and luck that anybody staring down the barrel of commencement must listen yet most likely hasn’t heard but. Celebrated New Yorker cartoonist Peter Steiner provides a marginally of caprice along with his irreverent illustrations sprinkled all through.
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Example text
They didn’t get hot, they didn’t get cold, nothing stung them, they displayed remarkable skill in any activity requiring strength and flexibility, and they moved around the jungle at three times my own pace. The fear I had to overcome was made up of all sorts of prejudices. My first attempt to escape had failed because I was afraid I would die of thirst, because I could not bring myself to drink the brown water in the puddles on the ground. So for months now I had practiced drinking the muddy river water, to prove to myself that I could survive the parasites that must already have colonized my stomach.
I had no watch; I was counting on my companion’s. She usually got annoyed when I asked her the time. I was reluctant to ask even now, then went ahead. “It’s nine o’clock,” she answered, aware that this was not the moment to create unnecessary tension. The camp was already asleep, which was one good thing. But for us the night was getting shorter and shorter. The guard was struggling to protect himself from the torrents of water, and the thud of the rain on the tin roof drowned the sound of my feet kicking the rotten boards.
I made an extreme effort to make myself recognize the bestiality of those men. I wanted to give myself the right to name it, to be able to cauterize my wounds and clean myself. My body rebelled: I was overcome by spasms. Quickly picking up the lengths of metal coiled at my feet, I jumped up, and in a panic I asked the guard for permission to go to the chontos. He didn’t bother to reply, since he saw I was already on my way there, taking great strides to reduce the distance to the makeshift latrines.