The famous writer and director said to students: “You are all going to die.”
Nerd King Joss Whedon, of “Firefly” and “Avengers” fame, gave a commencement speech to the 2013 graduating students at Wesleyan University.
An excerpt from the speech from Tor.com:
So, what I’d like to say to all of you is that you are all going to die.
This is a good commencement speech! Because I’m figuring…it’s got to go up from here, right? It can only get better. This is good. It can’t get more depressing. You have, in fact, already begun to die.
You look great. Don’t get me wrong. And you are youth and beauty, you are at your physical peak. Your bodies have just gotten off the ski slope at the peak of growth and potential! And now comes the black diamond mogul run to the grave.
And the weird thing is… your body wants to die. On a cellular level that’s what it wants. And that’s—probably?—not what you want. I’m confronted by a great deal of grand and worthy ambition from this student body. You want to be politicians, social workers, you want to be artists. Your body’s ambition? Mulch. Your body wants to make some babies and then go in the ground and fertilize things. That’s it!
And that seems like a bit of a contradiction. That doesn’t seem fair. For one thing, we’re telling you to go out into the world exactly when your body is saying, “Hey, let’s bring it down a notch.” And it is a contradiction, which is actually what I’d like to talk to you about: the contradictions between your body and your mind, your mind and itself.
I believe these contradictions and these tensions are the greatest gift we have and hopefully I can explain that.
Click here to read the full transcript.
What do you think of the message? If you graduated, do you remember the commencement speech? Did any of the ideas in it stick with you? If you were to give a commencement speech today, what would you include?
[Via: Tor.com]
Photo credit: Flickr / perobinson
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