Essay: Speech for A High School Graduate

Your official commencement speaker tackles the big themes, tells you to abjure greed, to play fair, to serve your community, to know thyself. Your more personally devoted commencement speaker agrees with all that.

But he has special wishes for you too -- idiosyncratic, of course, what an educated daughter may have come to expect from an oddball. People always said that you resemble him.

What he wishes you first is a love of travel. Travel will hold you back from doting on your troubles, and once you've seen something of the world, you will recognize foreign places as instances of human...

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