Gregory Maguire
Commencement Address
“The Engaged Life”
Saturday, May 12, 2007

President Sullivan, the estimable Mr. Chuck Close, faculty and staff, parents, family members, friends and well-wishers, and graduates of the College of Saint Rose, class of 2007:

—and a special greeting to an honored guest from the College of Saint Rose graduating class of 1937, who, seventy years ago this month, graduated with the award for the school’s top academic honors—Marie McAuliff Maguire—we call her Mommy, don’t you know…. Dear friends all:

The conventional wisdom about these sorts of addresses is as follows: Be brief, be memorable if you can, don’t talk religion or politics, and get out of the way, because Real Life is just on the other side of the podium—that is to say, on your side of the podium, not mine.

My hero, though, is a green-skinned witch, so conventional wisdom, I confess, only goes so far with me. And what can I say that might be both brief and memorable?

Of the three commencement speeches that I have endured—pardon me, I mean enjoyed—the one I remember, the one that made a difference to me, was about making ethical choices—about the cost and the rewards of not sinking into a stupor of cynicism or apathy. As a professional novelist and as a private citizen I happen to be fascinated with the ethical life. Mind you, I don’t mean the superior life, nor the correct life, but the engaged life: the life that takes questions seriously. That’s my subject and that’s my title: The Engaged Life.

Meeting Professor Sheehan of Saint Rose’s English department last night, I discovered she was the same Mr.s Sheehan who had been my third grade teacher. This put me in mind of grade school exercise, including a request to write a witty epigram, a la Poor Richard: “A stitch in time saves nine.” “The early bird catches the worm.” Mine was, “The perfect lady / Is active at eighty.” So you see I have been interested in the Engaged Life since grade school.
I did a little research about talks such as these. Someone told me about a commencement speech given by the American actress Meryl Streep. She is reported to have said something like, “Dear students, you are about to graduate. You may be surprised to find that Real Life is not at all like college. Real Life is much more like high school.”

It is a good line but since I wasn’t in that graduating class listening as intently as you are now doing, I couldn’t imagine where she went with this proposition. If Real Life is actually more like high school, some of us will be inclined to hand our diplomas back in today and reenlist in college for a little while longer.

Not long ago, I was offered the chance to meet the famous Ms. Streep, following a premiere for Robert Altman’s last film, called A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION. Of course, I had been watching her for decades on the silver screen, where in any number of brilliant performances her famous face was enlarged to be forty feet high. Did you ever notice that movie close-ups are blown up so huge that a Hollywood profile would seem right at home even if projected at midnight onto the side of Mount Rushmore? And I knew from the cinema that Meryl Streep is possessed of a high forehead even before being enlarged out of all human proportion.

As it happens, I had already glimpsed the famous actress live, years earlier, at the intermission of a concert at Madison Square Garden. I was in the balcony so admittedly I had a foreshortened view, but even from a height of several hundred feet, I could make her out at once. There she was, way way way down there: instantly recognizable. But in real life she looked tiny. I mean, everyone looks like a bug when you’re high above them, but she looked more bug-like than most. She walked past that tiny Doctor Ruth, remember her, the pint-sized sex doctor, and I swear the two women were about the same size.

So last year I came to this hoity-toity party for about forty people. I was with a friend, a Boston-area singer named Ronni Olitsky, and I had said to her: “You won’t believe it, take my word for it: Meryl Streep is tiny—five feet two tops. A miniature, I swear to God. You’ll see.” But first we had to pass security. I was carded, which was embarrassing, and then I got felt down for handguns, which would have been, well, almost flattering if it hadn’t been so ridiculous—before being allowed to enter the sanctum sanctorum.

Feeling something like detainees at an immigration checkpoint, we were finally admitted. And there she was, la Streep herself, standing in the center of the room, not moving. She’d just received a lifetime achievement award in front of an audience of six hundred people, and smilingly she had endured hours of audience devotion and professional testimonials delivered by her colleagues in the arts, including Kevin Kline and Woody Harrelson and Robert Altman. And through it all Meryl—we call her Meryl, you know—had been charming. So she was tired of being charming. She stood very still, wearing a kind of cat’s eye bifocals that frankly were not a particularly smart sartorial selection that evening if you ask me, and she blinked like some sort of extra-terrestrial creature with supernatural intelligence, and she exuded precisely the minimum amount of warmth the social situation required. She did not want to make new friends just then. That much was clear. She looked tired. In a benevolent sort of way she looked lethal. She also looked about five foot nine. “She’s not tiny,” hissed my friend Ronni. “You lied.”

“She is tiny,” I hissed back. “She must be wearing heels.”

Streep—we call her Streep, you know, Streep, sometimes The Streep—was extending her hand to greet people as they neared her. We lucky party guests didn’t fall into a reception line but approached looking in the other direction, in a casual, seemingly random kind of pattern, like a bit of choreography intending to simulate Brownian motion. As if we hadn’t quite intended to meet Meryl Streep but oh well, here she was, we might as well be polite. I noticed that the first well-wishers didn’t linger, but quickly fell away, withered by the force of her exhausted, graceful, but guarded reception.

“When we get closer, we can see if the little lady has heels on,” said Ronni, hiking her skirt a notch to show her own heels, as if in a kind of fashion challenge. We circled nearer, pretending to be more interested in the champagne and canapés, but when we got closer we could see that Meryl Streep was wearing ivory linen slacks perfectly cut so the cuffs settled only three-sixteenths of an inch from the floor. Her shoes—either nine inch heels or flats, whatever they were—remained totally invisible.

“Oh my gawd, what’ll we do?” said Ronni, as it was nearly our turn to approach and pay homage.

“Just as we get up to her,” I suggested, “say loudly, ‘oh, these wretched shoes of mine, with these unrepentantly high heels! How could anyone bear it?’ and point to your feet. Maybe you can get her involved in a conversation about footware, and she’ll reveal what she’s wearing.”

“It’ll never work,” said Ronni. “She’ll never fall for it. She’s much smarter than we are.”

I replied, “Don’t compare us to a major movie star who has been nominated for fourteen Academy Awards and only won, like, two of them. She’s talented but she’s not preternatural. Come on.”

“She’s too brainy,” insisted Ronni. “Did you know she gives commencement speeches?”

I had another idea. “Pretend you’re staggering in pain, crippled by your ungovernable high heels, and fall face down, full-length on the floor next to her. I’ll distract her by saying, ‘Oh, that’s my friend Ronni, she can’t walk in heels when in the presence of theatrical royalty,’ and while Meryl Streep is fluting out ‘Call 911!’ in a Latvian accent, you can lift her trouser cuff and check out those heels! When we get back to the car we’ll do a little basic math and figure out how tall she must be.”

Ronni refused to play along. “Why should I be the fall guy? Or gal? Why don’t you introduce yourself as the author of Wicked and bring up ruby slippers? Or Confessions of An Ugly Stepsister, with those glass slippers? With you it’s always about shoes, anyway.”

But I wouldn’t. Generally I don’t introduce myself as anyone special, because that seems too much like “compare and contrast,” and that is a temptation I try to avoid. Instead, we made our obeisance to the Queen of Drama without incident—this is all build-up and no punch-line, sorry—and we fawned and muttered the usual banalities, and so we left the party with our ignorance intact. Is Meryl Streep a short actress who wears platforms, or a tall actress who is so good that she can play five foot two convincingly? I daresay we will never know. We also never asked her why she thinks Real Life is more like high school than college.

Is Meryl Streep tall or short? Is measuring ourselves against Celebrity a way of making ourselves feel smug, or is it a temptation to make ourselves feel small? Should we compare ourselves to one another, or just to ourselves and to our own potential?

Certainly in first grade I could not have seen myself ever giving a commencement address. I was, in fact, a short little kid, and I am not a tall adult. Five foot 6, it says on the driver’s license I had to show to get in to meet the Big Streep. Big deal. And so while I am pleased to be here, I have wondered if I’m tall enough to deserve the honor of addressing you.

I am best known these days for being the author of WICKED, as you have heard, the novel that inspired the Broadway play. But being best known for one thing is not the same thing as being well-known, like, say, Meryl Streep. Frankly, this suits me just fine. Sometimes aspiring young writers ask, “How does it feel to be famous?” and I want to say, “It’s not about fame, it’s not even about accomplishment. It’s about the zeal to do the work. It’s about staying engaged. Don’t compare yourselves with me. Besides, obviously I can never be as famous as the Wicked Witch of the West, and that’s as it should be. I’m merely a part of her public relations team. She’s the one does all the photo shoots; I just hunker down in the back room and pound on the typewriter while I down glass after glass of strong, strong… tea.”

So the Wicked Witch of the West has been rehabilitated, in some quarters. She continues her broomstick flight across America in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, and abroad in London and Tokyo. But the renovation of her personal history began in Pine Hills, in Albany, New York. Specifically, in a building now used by Saint Rose, across from Saint Joseph Hall, where the old Pine Hills Library used to be located. 1000 Madison Avenue.

As a child I would walk from my home on Lancaster Street and I’d pass through the precincts of Saint Rose, which as an urban campus provided a safe and even lovely promenade for Pine Hills residents on their way here or there. I would continue on to mass at St. Vincent de Paul’s, or I would cross mid-block and go either to the Pine Hills Library or to VI grade school sprawling behind it.

In the library, though it sounds a contradiction in terms, I found my Real Life. In novels of magic lands I found distraction. In poetry I found meaning. In plays I found ethics. In biographies of great figures of history and the arts I found heroes to emulate. The better the art, the deeper the consolation. In the library I found THE WIZARD OF OZ, and eventually, as my way of living the Engaged Life as a writer, I took on the task of revisiting the story. Hence WICKED.

So back to the question Meryl Streep seemed to be posing (we call her Doctor Streep; we do): What is Real Life like? You graduates are about to find out for yourselves. And what advice can I give you? I only know a little about teaching children to trust themselves as storytellers. I know a very little about the glamour of Broadway and the occasional pleasant fuss of a bestseller list. I know nothing about Chemistry or Nursing or corporate law or Islamic studies or Business Accounting or the rise and fall of the Visigoths. So how can I talk to you about Real Life? I write books about witches and political despots and pumpkin coaches and magic mirrors.

Still, I did accept the invitation and therefore the challenge, so I will make five easy-to-remember recommendations. I will speak in identifiable points, sometimes called bullets but not by me since I’m an antiwar activist, and if that’s a political commentary, whoops sorry. I will speak in outline format, since I was taught essay writing by the good Sisters of Perpetual Grammar.

These are not instructions inspired by Real Life, nor by college life, nor even by high school life. They are not inspired by Broadway singers or New York editors or Hollywood movie stars. They are instructions remembered from my days in early grammar school, that nest and hatchery of our academic origins. First grade is well worth remembering today as you get ready to fly from the nest of your college years toward Real Life, whatever and wherever that is.

Point number one derives from my earliest remembered literary epiphany. The experience is seared into my memory as firmly as these famous lines from Emily Dickinson: “We never know how high we are / Till we are asked to rise / And then if we are true to plan / Our statures touch the skies—” The text in question, though, wasn’t Emily Dickinson. It was the first story in the first grade reader. The story was called “Look and See.” In its entirety, quote: “Look. Look, look. Oh look. Look and see. Oh, look. Look and see.”

Well, this seems to me pretty sage advice, and not only for those navigating traffic on the Northway. Note that the message isn’t merely “Look.” Anyone can merely look. It takes a Chuck Close to “Look and see.” It means: Use your eyes but don’t forget to use your brains, people.

That little work of first-grade genius encodes a strategy for engaging with our quiveringly fragile and wonderful world, awesome in its age-old troubles, transparently beautiful still with promise. Look and see. Wherever you are: wherever you find yourself in the Real Life to come, in any ethical dilemma. Don’t just bark and bite. Don’t just yip and yawp. Look. Look and see. It means being both receptive and reflective. It means being quiet a little bit before you get loud. Look and see. That’s point one.

Point two is also from first grade. It is the name of the workbook that accompanied the first grade reader. It was called “Think and Do.” I remember the nun braying out, “All right class, everyone take out your Thinks and Dos.” I thought it was one word for a while: think’n’do. But looking back on the matter, the instruction, however basic, still pertains. First you THINK. Then you DO. It’s easy. Don’t DO before thinking. First THINK, then DO. Write this on a postcard to remind your elected representatives.

I’m not being facetious. You may find yourselves tempted, the more higher education you get, to think and think and think and never do. Remain engaged. The Perfect Lady is active at eighty. Think AND do.

Now we’re up to number three, which is:
3.) Question Authority.

Question authority. I first came across this phrase on a lapel button worn by a decent fellow protesting the Vietnam War. Of course, being tendentious, not to mention reactionary in the way the young and timid so often are, my first inclination was to respond, “Question authority? Says who? Who are you to tell me what to do?”

In time, though, I came around to seeing that, like “Look and see,” it is useful always to “Question Authority”—whether that authority be your mother, your church, your government, your college, your newspaper, or your commencement speaker, or your own often automatic knee-jerk responses to newly complicated questions.

To question authority doesn’t mean, necessarily, to reject authority: It just means to maintain a healthy skepticism toward anyone who makes pronouncements about divine providence, say, or medical diagnoses. Or declarations of war. Ask to see the backup material. Check out the paperwork. When you get it, 1) Look and see, and then 2) Think and do.

I am told that Saint Theresa of Avila, on her way from one of her Carmelite convents to another—this would have been in central Spain, I suppose, sixteenth century—is reported to have suffered a calamity one day. The axle on her cart broke just as the equipage was crossing a bridge, and the cart slipped sideways and the donkey bolted and Saint Theresa and all her luggage were dumped over the bridge in a stream. The luggage proceeded to float away, but Saint Theresa merely sat in water up to her shoulders. She eventually raised her finger heavenward and said, “And you wonder why you don’t have more friends!”

Perhaps this wasn’t questioning authority so much as just offering some friendly advice. It’s good to know the difference. Still, Saint Theresa’s talking to God leads toward my fourth point.

Look, I know you’re tired. You were up late last night celebrating. Let’s review.
1.) Look and see.
2.) Think and do.
3.) Question Authority.
Two points left.
Ready to move on to point number four, I suppose I should follow my own advice to you—to question authority. I should question the conventional wisdom I quoted at the beginning: That one should not make religious or political points at a commencement speech. At first blush, I understand the rubric as a gesture of charity: let’s face it, we don’t all huddle under the same political or spiritual umbrella, and a commencement speech is meant to be inclusive. Still, the College of Saint Rose is an institution of higher learning that endorses the ideals of tolerance, diversity, and intellectual inquiry, and it is also a Catholic institution.

So I’m going to break with convention and give you a sound bite that neatly and efficiently trespasses in both forbidden categories of politics and religion. Both at once. The advice, point number four, is this:

Vote and pray.

Vote—and pray. It has the sound of a joke, but I mean every word. Though you might conceive prayer to be an invention of the human psyche, question the authority of your own preconceptions and remember that you might also be wrong. Perhaps Real Life does involve an aspect of the divine. Why not remain engaged to the proposition that it might? Vote and pray. Pray—but don’t rely solely on divine intervention. Also vote. Vote responsibly; vote as if your life depended on it, for it does.

So: where are we in our countdown? Can you remember these little snippets of advice? Look and see. Think and Do. Question Authority. Vote and pray. And the final one, dear friends, is courtesy of the Wicked Witch of the West as she expresses it month after month on Broadway through the memorable lyrics of Stephen Schwartz: Defy gravity. Why not? It’s your turn. “We never know how high we are / Till we are asked to rise,” said Emily Dickinson—as it happens, one of my models for Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West. “And then if we are true to plan / Our statures touch the skies.” Then, if we are true to plan, we defy gravity. We soar out on our own and find out what Real Life is all about. We don’t need Meryl Streep or Gregory Maguire to tell us about it.

I am about to be done, but I’ve thought of a postscript. Because of point three: QUESTION AUTHORITY, I thought I should demonstrate that I practice what I preach. So, before doing a final draft of these remarks, I googled “Meryl Streep.” I found, posted on a website, the commencement address the actress once gave. I can verify that she did in fact make that remark about Real Life being more like High School. I also found out that what SHE was teasing the audience with, that day, was a question not unlike mine, one that she coyly refused to answer: How tall, really, is Dustin Hoffman?

So that brings me to an unanticipated and final little postcard’s worth of advice. My five recommendations are all pro-active, as they say: Look and See, Think and Do, Question Authority, Vote and Pray, and Defy Gravity: But here is one cautionary note. Please, friends, please don’t succumb to the temptation to Compare and Contrast yourself with anyone but yourself. It doesn’t matter if someone else next to you has a naturally loftier stature or if they disguise themselves with usefully high heels. What matters is how you unfold your own stature, how you touch the skies. This is called continuing education. The Engaged Life. And I’m certain Meryl Streep agrees with me. (I would call her to find out, but her number is unlisted.)

The Emily Dickinson poem I quoted earlier concludes with a second stanza: “The heroism we recite / Would be a normal thing / Did not ourselves the cubits warp / For fear to be a king.”

Do not cut yourselves down to size. Do not sell yourselves short. Do not warp your own cubits. Own your own height: and begin to fly from themere. The most advantageous launching post for any defier of gravity is truth.

Bon voyage to you. As you rise toward your own future, on broomstick or any other conveyance, throw a glance over your shoulder at your alma mater. She shrinks and loses definition beneath you. She is melting back. The familiar buildings are lost in the smudgy arms of white pine branches. The campus is absorbed into a patchy midtown neighborhood of an upstate city. Soon the scrim-clouds of time will mask the particulars of this classroom, that dorm, this teacher, that course, this friend, that lover, this epiphany, that crisis. But as you go, discovering your own horizons by living the Engaged Life, remember to stay in touch. Don’t be a stranger. Saint Rose has helped to make you ready to find out what Real Life is; she is one of your homes. And as we are often reminded, there’s no place like home.

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