At our divisional graduation ceremony today, the dean recalled his own graduation, when Joseph Brodsky was the speaker, and apparently said "life is a game with few rules and no referee, which is why so many people lose and so many cheat." The dean went on to say that this was true but not the end of the story, for the world changes in ways nobody can imagine before they happen. Desmond Tutu "didn't happen before he happened," nor did Aung San Suu Kyi, or Barack Obama. An elegant way of making the obligatory commencement speech points that (i) graduates should be themselves, and that (ii) they can change the world.
But I was intrigued and a little depressed by the Brodsky quote, which seemed like an odd thing to say at a commencement. Was there a larger point he was making? I turned to my trusty friend the internet and found this (with no citation): Life is a game with many rules but no referee. One learns how to play it more by watching it than by consulting any book, including the holy book. Small wonder, then, that so many play dirty, that so few win, that so many lose.
Versions of this turn up in lists of quotes about rules and about referees (never with a citation or a larger context) - but not commencements. What I found on searching for "Brodsky + commencement" was a line from an address he gave at Williams in 1984: The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even—if you will—eccentricity. That is, something that can't be feigned, faked, imitated; something even a seasoned imposter couldn't be happy with. That hits the obligatory points in its way, I suppose.
Another Brodsky commencement speech turned up, too, this one given at Dartmouth in 1989, and this time the whole deal and not just a soundbite. It ends: What's good about boredom, about anguish and the sense of meaninglessness of your own, of everything else's existence, is that it is not a deception. Try to embrace, or let yourself be embraced by, boredom and anguish, which are larger than you anyhow. No doubt you'll find that bosom smothering, yet try to endure it as long as you can, and then some more. Above all, don't think you've goofed somewhere along the line, don't try to retrace your steps to correct the error. No, as W. H. Auden said, "Believe your pain." This awful bear hug is no mistake. Nothing that disturbs you ever is.
I'm glad our dean heard Brodsky on a good day!
