새로온 러플린 총장님의 여름 학기 졸업식 축하인사. 예전과는 조금 다르다.
Hello Everyone,
I apologize for having to address you in English. I just arrived here last night, you know, so we are graduating together.
You students we are honoring today have reached this point through native talent, hard work, and focused goal-setting, and you are to be congratulated for having done this difficult job well. It’s a good day for your parents too, who have been worrying about you for a long time and can now worry less? although not as much less as they think.
However, I would like to remind everyone that university’s graduations are not relay about milestones but rather the transfer of power between the generations? something most of us find difficult to talk about because it is so frightening and mysterious. I would like the younger people to fix this moment in their minds and imagine recalling it ten years from now, when you are struggling with early career and family, or twenty years from now, when your own offspring are acquiring their adult minds and leaving home, or thirty years from now, when you begin to notice your friends dying. It will bring a smile to your face, for you will remember your university years as the last time in your life you are free. And you will know that a free man or woman has the responsibility to sacrifice that freedom for the betterment of civilization, to lovingly create art, property and children in the brief time given to them? eventually leaving it all behind and, one hopes, the world a better place for the effort. This is the reason why parents get so choked up at graduation ceremonies, even though logically we should be relieved.
I wish you all good fortune, and also offer you a bit of advice always suitable for people of talent : work hard, play hard, and compromise minimally. There is a famous story of a man who asked his father, as he lay dying, if there was anything he regretted. “Yes” the old man said
“I regret not having appreciated that anything I would have asked of life, life would have paid.” I expect all of you to take this man’s words to heart, and to make certain that your great gifts are not wasted, but become the glorious contributions to history they were meant to be. Thank you.