Here's the text of a speech Bill Watterson gave at Kenyon
College, Gambier Ohio, to the 1990 graduating class.
Some Thoughts on the Real World by One Who Glimpsed It and Fled
Bill Watterson
Kenyon College Commencement
May 20, 1990
I have a recurring dream about Kenyon. In it, I'm walking to
the post office on the way to my first class at the start of the school year.
Suddenly it occurs to me that I don't have my schedule memorized, and I'm not
sure which classes I'm taking, or where exactly I'm supposed to be going.
As I walk up the steps to the post office, I realize I don't
have my box key, and in fact, I can't remember what my box number is. I'm
certain that everyone I know has written me a letter, but I can't get them. I
get more flustered and annoyed by the minute. I head back to Middle Path,
racking my brains and asking myself, "How many more years until I
graduate? ...Wait, didn't I graduate already? How old am I?" Then I wake
up.
Experience is food for the brain. And four years at Kenyon
is a rich meal. I suppose it should be no surprise that your brains will
probably burp up Kenyon for a long time. And I think the reason I keep having
the dream is because its central image is a metaphor for a good part of life:
that is, not knowing where you're going or what you're doing.
I graduated exactly ten years ago. That doesn't give me a
great deal of experience to speak from, but I'm emboldened by the fact that I
can't remember a bit of my commencement, and I trust that in half an
hour, you won't remember of yours either.
In the middle of my sophomore year at Kenyon, I decided to
paint a copy of Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam" from the Sistine
Chapel on the ceiling of my dorm room. By standing on a chair, I could reach
the ceiling, and I taped off a section, made a grid, and started to copy the
picture from my art history book.
Working with your arm over your head is hard work, so a few
of my more ingenious friends rigged up a scaffold for me by stacking two chairs
on my bed, and laying the table from the hall lounge across the chairs and over
to the top of my closet. By climbing up onto my bed and up the chairs, I could
hoist myself onto the table, and lie in relative comfort two feet under my
painting. My roommate would then hand up my paints, and I could work for
several hours at a stretch.
The picture took me months to do, and in fact, I didn't
finish the work until very near the end of the school year. I wasn't much of a
painter then, but what the work lacked in color sense and technical flourish,
it gained in the incongruity of having a High Renaissance masterpiece in a
college dorm that had the unmistakable odor of old beer cans and older laundry.
The painting lent an air of cosmic grandeur to my room, and
it seemed to put life into a larger perspective. Those boring, flowery English
poets didn't seem quite so important, when right above my head God was
transmitting the spark of life to man.
My friends and I liked the finished painting so much in
fact, that we decided I should ask permission to do it. As you might expect,
the housing director was curious to know why I wanted to paint this elaborate
picture on my ceiling a few weeks before school let out. Well, you don't get to
be a sophomore at Kenyon without learning how to fabricate ideas you never had,
but I guess it was obvious that my idea was being proposed retroactively. It
ended up that I was allowed to paint the picture, so long as I painted over it
and returned the ceiling to normal at the end of the year. And that's what I
did.
Despite the futility of the whole episode, my fondest
memories of college are times like these, where things were done out of some
inexplicable inner imperative, rather than because the work was demanded.
Clearly, I never spent as much time or work on any authorized art project, or
any poli sci paper, as I spent on this one act of vandalism.
It's surprising how hard we'll work when the work is done
just for ourselves. And with all due respect to John Stuart Mill, maybe
utilitarianism is overrated. If I've learned one thing from being a cartoonist,
it's how important playing is to creativity and happiness. My job is
essentially to come up with 365 ideas a year.
If you ever want to find out just how uninteresting you
really are, get a job where the quality and frequency of your thoughts
determine your livelihood. I've found that the only way I can keep writing
every day, year after year, is to let my mind wander into new territories. To
do that, I've had to cultivate a kind of mental playfulness.
We're not really taught how to recreate constructively. We
need to do more than find diversions; we need to restore and expand ourselves.
Our idea of relaxing is all too often to plop down in front of the television
set and let its pandering idiocy liquefy our brains. Shutting off the thought
process is not rejuvenating; the mind is like a car battery-it recharges by
running.
You may be surprised to find how quickly daily routine and
the demands of "just getting by" absorb your waking hours. You may be
surprised matters of habit rather than thought and inquiry. You may be
surprised to find how quickly you start to see your life in terms of other
people's expectations rather than issues. You may be surprised to find out how
quickly reading a good book sounds like a luxury.
At school, new ideas are thrust at you every day. Out in the
world, you'll have to find the inner motivation to search for new ideas on your
own. With any luck at all, you'll never need to take an idea and squeeze a
punchline out of it, but as bright, creative people, you'll be called upon to
generate ideas and solutions all your lives. Letting your mind play is the best
way to solve problems.
For me, it's been liberating to put myself in the mind of a
fictitious six year-old each day, and rediscover my own curiosity. I've been
amazed at how one idea leads to others if I allow my mind to play and wander. I
know a lot about dinosaurs now, and the information has helped me out of quite
a few deadlines.
A playful mind is inquisitive, and learning is fun. If you
indulge your natural curiosity and retain a sense of fun in new experience, I
think you'll find it functions as a sort of shock absorber for the bumpy road
ahead.
So, what's it like in the real world? Well, the food is
better, but beyond that, I don't recommend it.
I don't look back on my first few years out of school with
much affection, and if I could have talked to you six months ago, I'd have
encouraged you all to flunk some classes and postpone this moment as long as
possible. But now it's too late.
Unfortunately, that was all the advice I really had. When I
was sitting where you are, I was one of the lucky few who had a cushy job
waiting for me. I'd drawn political cartoons for the Collegian for four years,
and the Cincinnati Post had hired me as an editorial cartoonist. All my friends
were either dreading the infamous first year of law school, or despondent about
their chances of convincing anyone that a history degree had any real
application outside of academia.
Boy, was I smug.
As it turned out, my editor instantly regretted his decision
to hire me. By the end of the summer, I'd been given notice; by the beginning
of winter, I was in an unemployment line; and by the end of my first year away
from Kenyon, I was broke and living with my parents again. You can imagine how
upset my dad was when he learned that Kenyon doesn't give refunds.
Watching my career explode on the lauchpad caused some soul
searching. I eventually admitted that I didn't have what it takes to be a good
political cartoonist, that is, an interest in politics, and I returned to my
firs love, comic strips.
For years I got nothing but rejection letters, and I was
forced to accept a real job.
A REAL job is a job you hate. I designed car ads and grocery
ads in the windowless basement of a convenience store, and I hated every single
minute of the 4-1/2 million minutes I worked there. My fellow prisoners at work
were basically concerned about how to punch the time clock at the perfect
second where they would earn another 20 cents without doing any work for it.
It was incredible: after every break, the entire staff would
stand around in the garage where the time clock was, and wait for that last
click. And after my used car needed the head gasket replaced twice, I waited in
the garage too.
It's funny how at Kenyon, you take for granted that the
people around you think about more than the last episode of Dynasty. I guess
that's what it means to be in an ivory tower.
Anyway, after a few months at this job, I was starved for
some life of the mind that, during my lunch break, I used to read those poli
sci books that I'd somehow never quite finished when I was here. Some of those
books were actually kind of interesting. It was a rude shock to see just how
empty and robotic life can be when you don't care about what you're doing, and
the only reason you're there is to pay the bills.
Thoreau said, "the mass of men lead lives of quiet
desperation." That's one of those dumb cocktail quotations that will
strike fear in your heart as you get older. Actually, I was leading a life of
loud desperation.
When it seemed I would be writing about "Midnite
Madness Sale-abrations" for the rest of my life, a friend used to console
me that cream always rises to the top. I used to think, so do people who throw
themselves into the sea.
I tell you all this because it's worth recognizing that
there is no such thing as an overnight success. You will do well to cultivate
the resources in yourself that bring you happiness outside of success or
failure. The truth is, most of us discover where we are headed when we arrive.
At that time, we turn around and say, yes, this is obviously where I was going
all along. It's a good idea to try to enjoy the scenery on the detours, because
you'll probably take a few.
I still haven't drawn the strip as long as it took me to get
the job. To endure five years of rejection to get a job requires either a faith
in oneself that borders on delusion, or a love of the work. I loved the work.
Drawing comic strips for five years without pay drove home
the point that the fun of cartooning wasn't in the money; it was in the work.
This turned out to be an important realization when my break finally came.
Like many people, I found that what I was chasing wasn't
what I caught. I've wanted to be a cartoonist since I was old enough to read
cartoons, and I never really thought about cartoons as being a business. It
never occurred to me that a comic strip I created would be at the mercy of a
bloodsucking corporate parasite called a syndicate, and that I'd be faced with
countless ethical decisions masquerading as simple business decisions.
To make a business decision, you don't need much philosophy;
all you need is greed, and maybe a little knowledge of how the game works.
As my comic strip became popular, the pressure to capitalize
on that popularity increased to the point where I was spending almost as much
time screaming at executives as drawing. Cartoon merchandising is a $12 billion
dollar a year industry and the syndicate understandably wanted a piece of that
pie. But the more I though about what they wanted to do with my creation, the
more inconsistent it seemed with the reasons I draw cartoons.
Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out,
and you're really buying into someone else's system of values, rules and
rewards.
The so-called "opportunity" I faced would have
meant giving up my individual voice for that of a money-grubbing corporation.
It would have meant my purpose in writing was to sell things, not say things.
My pride in craft would be sacrificed to the efficiency of mass production and
the work of assistants. Authorship would become committee decision. Creativity
would become work for pay. Art would turn into commerce. In short, money was
supposed to supply all the meaning I'd need.
What the syndicate wanted to do, in other words, was turn my
comic strip into everything calculated, empty and robotic that I hated about my
old job. They would turn my characters into television hucksters and T-shirt
sloganeers and deprive me of characters that actually expressed my own
thoughts.
On those terms, I found the offer easy to refuse.
Unfortunately, the syndicate also found my refusal easy to refuse, and we've
been fighting for over three years now. Such is American business, I guess,
where the desire for obscene profit mutes any discussion of conscience.
You will find your own ethical dilemmas in all parts of your
lives, both personal and professional. We all have different desires and needs,
but if we don't discover what we want from ourselves and what we stand for, we
will live passively and unfulfilled. Sooner or later, we are all asked to
compromise ourselves and the things we care about. We define ourselves by our
actions. With each decision, we tell ourselves and the world who we are. Think
about what you want out of this life, and recognize that there are many kinds
of success.
Many of you will be going on to law school, business school,
medical school, or other graduate work, and you can expect the kind of starting
salary that, with luck, will allow you to pay off your own tuition debts within
your own lifetime.
But having an enviable career is one thing, and being a
happy person is another.
Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your
soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and
excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually
considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if
it's to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes
an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and
activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to
stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his
potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.
You'll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not,
to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and
what you're doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I
guarantee you'll hear about them.
To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's
still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble.
Reading those turgid philosophers here in these remote stone
buildings may not get you a job, but if those books have forced you to ask
yourself questions about what makes life truthful, purposeful, meaningful, and
redeeming, you have the Swiss Army Knife of mental tools, and it's going to
come in handy all the time.
I think you'll find that Kenyon touched a deep part of you.
These have been formative years. Chances are, at least of your roommates has
taught you everything ugly about human nature you ever wanted to know.
With luck, you've also had a class that transmitted a spark
of insight or interest you'd never had before. Cultivate that interest, and you
may find a deeper meaning in your life that feeds your soul and spirit. Your
preparation for the real world is not in the answers you've learned, but in the
questions you've learned how to ask yourself.
Graduating from Kenyon, I suspect you'll find yourselves
quite well prepared indeed.
I wish you all fulfillment and happiness. Congratulations on
your achievement.
Bill Watterson
