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Eccentrics: he hopes that you always have plenty of them about you, and few, if any, sound thinkers. Sound thinkers appear on television; sycophants award them prizes for sound thinking. Eccentrics have a sound of their own, like the wild Englishman Lord Berners, who invited a horse to tea, or less extravagantly, Bill Russell, who played basketball to meet only his own standards of excellence. Russell told his daughter that he never heard the boos of the crowd because he never heard the cheers -- no easy feat in an age pumped up by windbags and Kirkus Reviews. Your commencement speaker hopes that you will turn a deaf ear to empty praise as much as to careless blame, that you will scare yourself with your own severity.
Solitude he wishes you as well, but not solitude without a frame. Choose creative times and places to be by yourself. In museums, for instance, where you may confront Vermeer or Velazquez eye to eye. On summer Sundays, too, when you may be alone with the city in its most clear and wistful light: the mirrored buildings angled like kitchen knives, the Hopper stores dead quiet, the city's poor dazed like laundry hung out to dry on their fire escapes. For contrast, seek real country roads, tire-track roads straddling islands of weeds and rolling out into white haze. Such roads are not easy to find these days, but they exist, waiting to trace your solitude back into your memories, your dreams.
You never back down from a fight. Your commencement speaker cheers you for that, and hopes you do not weaken or think safe. Still, it helps to learn that some fights are too small for kindling, and if you must fight out of your weight class, always fight up. Hatred without a fight is self-consuming, and fighting without hatred is purposeless, so regretfully he wishes you some hatred too. But not much, and not to hold too long. There is always more cheapness in the world than you suspect, but less than you believe at the time it touches you. Just don't let the trash build up. And there is much to praise.
Such as your country, which, odd to admit, he hopes that you will always cherish, that you will acknowledge the immeasurable good in the place as well as the stupidities and wrongs. If public indignation over the scandals in Washington proves anything, it is that Americans remain innocent enough to believe in government by laws, and to be angered by deceit in power. He hopes that you retain and nurture that innocence, which is your country's saving grace.
In general, he wishes that you see the world generously, that you take note of and rail against all the Lebanons of violence, the Africas of want, but that you also rear back and bless the whole. This is not as hard to do as it may seem. Concentrate on details, and embrace what you fear. The trick is to love the world as it is, the way a father loves a daughter, helpless and attached as he watches her stretch, bloom, rise past his tutelage to her independent, miraculous ascendancy. But you must never let go entirely, as he will never let you go. You gave birth to each other, and you commence together. Goodbye, my girl.