October marks the beginning of Graduation Speaker Picking season. Most years, that hasn’t meant much to me, since I wasn’t graduating and I didn’t really care what lame-o speaker the school convinced to deliver trite generalities to several hundred graduates and their assorted family members. But this year is different. This year I am graduating. And if the designated celebrity speaker is anything like the speaker the first time I graduated (the eminent and eminently unemployable Richard Wagoner), I will be sorely disappointed.
So I’m throwing a name out. A name with a Duke connection (via his daughter, a freshman). A big name. Correction: The biggest name. Enough with the suspense. It’s Bruce Springsteen.
And rather than make the exquisitely obvious and self-evident argument that there could be no better graduation speaker than The Boss, I decided to illustrate Springsteen’s excellence as a graduation speaker by constructing a graduation speech entirely from his own lyrics.
Class of 2011:
Grab your ticket and your suitcase, thunder’s rolling down the tracks. You don’t know where you’re going, but you know you won’t be back.
Don’t try for a home run, baby, if you can get the job done with a hit. Remember a quitter never wins and a winner never quits. The sun don’t shine on a sleepin’ dog’s ass. And all the rest of that stuff.
Once I spent my time playing tough guy scenes. I had skin like leather and the diamond-hard look of a cobra. I was born blue and weathered but I burst just like a supernova. I could walk like Brando right into the sun, then dance just like a Casanova with my blackjack and jacket and hair slicked sweet, silver star studs on my duds just like a Harley in heat. But I was living in a world of childish dreams.
Then I came crashing down like a drunk on a barroom floor. I was bruised and battered, I couldn’t tell what I felt. I was unrecognizable to myself. I saw my reflection in a window; I didn’t know my own face.
Now a life of leisure and a pirate’s treasure don’t make much for tragedy. But it’s a sad man, my friend, who’s living in his own skin and can’t stand the company. I put my heart and soul I put ’em high upon a shelf, right next to the faith the faith that I’d lost in myself. I went down into the desert city just tryin’ so hard to shed my skin. I crawled deep into some kind of darkness lookin’ to burn out every trace of who I’d been.
Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true, or is it something worse?
You can’t start a fire worrying about your little world falling apart.
You can hide ’neath your covers and study your pain, make crosses from your lovers, throw roses in the rain, waste your summer praying in vain. You end up like a dog that’s been beat too much, ’till you spend half your life just covering up.
Talk about a dream. Try to make it real.... You spend your life waiting for a moment that just don’t come. Well, don’t waste your time waiting.
Wherever there’s somebody fightin’ for a place to stand, or decent job, or a helpin’ hand; wherever somebody’s strugglin’ to be free, look in their eyes. Don’t make no difference what nobody says, ain’t nobody like to be alone. Everybody’s got a secret, Sonny, something that they just can’t face.
Hard times, baby, well they come to us all, sure as the tickin’ of the clock on the wall.
[So] take a right at the light, keep goin’ straight until night, and then you’re on your own.
Alex Fanaroff is a fourth-year medical student. His column runs every Wednesday.
- Land of Hope and Dreams, 2001
- My Best Was Never Good Enough, 1995
- Two Hearts, 1980
- It’s Hard to be a Saint in the City, 1973
- Two Hearts, 1980
- My Beautiful Reward, 1992
- Streets of Philadelphia, 1995
- Better Days, 1992
- Living Proof, 1992
- The River, 1980
- Dancing in the Dark, 1984
- Thunder Road, 1975
- Born in the U.S.A., 1984
- Badlands, 1978
- The Ghost of Tom Joad, 1995
- Hungry Heart, 1980
- Darkness on the Edge of Town, 1978
- Waitin’ on a Sunny Day, 2002
- Blinded by the Light, 1973
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