Filmmaker Ken Burns’s advice to graduates from his 2024 undergraduate commencement address at Brandeis University on May 19th

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Noted filmmaker Ken Burns gave the 2024 undergraduate commencement address at Brandeis University. You can read a transcript here. There also is a YouTube video here. Ken gave them the following advice:

 

“Listen. Be curious, not cool. Insecurity makes liars of us all. Remember, none of us get out of here alive. The inevitable vicissitudes of life, no matter how well gated our communities, will visit us all. Grief is a part of life, and if you explore its painful precincts, it will make you stronger. Do good things, help others. Leadership is humility and generosity squared. Remember the opposite of faith is not doubt. Doubt is central to faith. The opposite of faith is certainty. The kinship of the soul begins with your own at times withering self-examination. Try to change that unchangeable human nature of Ecclesiastes, but start with you. ‘Nothing so needs reforming,’ Mark Twain once chided us, ‘as other people’s habits.’

 

Don’t confuse success with excellence. Do not descend too deeply into specialism. Educate all your parts, you will be healthier. Do not get stuck in one place. ‘Travel is fatal to prejudice,’ Twain also said. Be in nature, which is always perfect and where nothing is binary. Its sheer majesty may remind you of your own atomic insignificance, as one observer put it, but in the inscrutable and paradoxical ways of wild places, you will feel larger, inspirited, just as the egotist in our midst is diminished by his or her self-regard.

 

At some point, make babies. One of the greatest things that will happen to you, I mean it, one of the greatest things that will happen to you is that you will have to worry, I mean really worry, about someone other than yourself. It is liberating and exhilarating, I promise. Ask your parents (audience laughs).

 

Choose honor over hypocrisy, virtue over vulgarity, discipline over dissipation, character over cleverness, sacrifice over self-indulgence. Do not lose your enthusiasm, in its Greek etymology the word enthusiasm means simply, ‘God in us.’ Serve your country. Insist that we fight the right wars. Denounce oppression everywhere.    

 

Convince your government, as Lincoln understood, that the real threat always and still comes from within this favored land. Insist that we support science and the arts, especially the arts. They have nothing to do with the actual defense of our country; they just make our country worth defending. Remember what Louis Brandeis said, ‘The most important political office is that of the private citizen.’ Vote. Please vote. You indelibly underscore your citizenship, and most important, our kinship with each other when you do. Good luck and Godspeed.” 

 

He included a pair of Mark Twain quotes, and one from Louis Brandeis. The first Twain quote on reforming habits is from Pudd’inhead Wilson, as discussed by Garson O’Toole at Quote Investigator on February 16, 2017 in an article titled Put all your eggs in one basket, and then watch that basket. The second is from Innocents Abroad, as discussed by Craig Thompson at

Clearing Customs on September 8, 2019 in another article titled The reports of Mark Twain’s travel quotations are somewhat exaggerated.

 

 The silhouette came from Openclipart.