Calvin and Hobbes at Martijn's - Bill Watterson

H ere's the text of a speech Bill<br>Watterson gave at Kenyon College,<br>Gambier Ohio, to the 1990 graduating class.

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE REAL WORLD BY ONE WHO GLIMPSED IT AND FLED

Bill Watterson<br>Kenyon College Commencement<br>May 20,<br>1990

I have a recurring dream about Kenyon. In it, I'm walking to the post<br>office on the way to my first class at the start of the school year.<br>Suddenly it occurs to me that I don't have my schedule memorized, and<br>I'm not sure which classes I'm taking, or where exactly I'm supposed to<br>be going.

As I walk up the steps to the postoffice, I realize I don't have my box<br>key, and in fact, I can't remember what my box number is. I'm certain<br>that everyone I know has written me a letter, but I can't get them. I<br>get more flustered and annoyed by the minute. I head back to Middle<br>Path, racking my brains and asking myself, "How many more years<br>until I graduate? ...Wait, didn't I graduate already?? How old AM<br>I?" Then I wake up.

Experience is food for the brain. And four years at Kenyon is a rich<br>meal. I suppose it should be no surprise that your brains will probably<br>burp up Kenyon for a long time. And I think the reason I keep having the<br>dream is because its central image is a metaphor for a good part of<br>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<br>experience to speak from, but I'm emboldened by the fact that I can't<br>remember a bit of MY commencement, and I trust that in half an hour, you<br>won't remember of yours either.

In the middle of my sophomore year at Kenyon, I decided to paint a copy<br>of Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam" from the Sistine Chapel<br>on the ceiling of my dorm room. By standing on a chair, I could reach<br>the ceiling, and I taped off a section, made a grid, and started to copy<br>the picture from my art history book.

Working with your arm over your head is hard work, so a few of my more<br>ingenious friends rigged up a scaffold for me by stacking two chairs on<br>my bed, and laying the table from the hall lounge across the chairs and<br>over to the top of my closet. By climbing up onto my bed and up the<br>chairs, I could hoist myself onto the table, and lie in relative comfort<br>two feet under my painting. My roommate would then hand up my paints,<br>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<br>until very near the end of the school year. I wasn't much of a painter<br>then, but what the work lacked in color sense and technical flourish, it<br>gained in the incongruity of having a High Renaissance masterpiece in a<br>college dorm that had the unmistakable odor of old beer cans and older<br>laundry.

The painting lent an air of cosmic grandeur to my room, and<br>it seemed to put life into a larger perspective. Those boring, flowery<br>English poets didn't seem quite so important, when right above my head<br>God was transmitting the spark of life to man.

My friends and I liked the finished painting so much in fact, that we<br>decided I should ask permission to do it. As you might expect, the<br>housing director was curious to know why I wanted to paint this elaborate<br>picture on my ceiling a few weeks before school let out. Well, you don't<br>get to be a sophomore at Kenyon without learning how to fabricate ideas<br>you never had, but I guess it was obvious that my idea was being proposed<br>retroactively. It ended up that I was allowed to paint the picture, so<br>long as I painted over it and returned the ceiling to normal at the end<br>of the year. And that's what I did.

Despite the futility of the whole episode, my fondest memories of<br>college are times like these, where things were done out of some<br>inexplicable inner imperative, rather than because the work was<br>demanded. Clearly, I never spent as much time or work on any authorized<br>art project, or any poli sci paper, as I spent on this one act of<br>vandalism.

It's surprising how hard we'll work when the work is done just for<br>ourselves. And with all due respect to John Stuart Mill, maybe<br>utilitarianism is overrated. If I've learned one thing from being a<br>cartoonist, it's how important playing is to creativity and happiness.<br>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,<br>get a job where the quality and frequency of your thoughts determine<br>your livelihood. I've found that the only way I can keep writing<br>every day, year after year, is to let my mind wander into new<br>territories. To do that, I've had to cultivate a kind of mental<br>playfulness.

We're not really taught how to recreate constructively. We need to do<br>more than find diversions; we need to restore and expand ourselves. Our<br>idea of relaxing is all too often to plop down in front of the<br>television set and let its pandering idiocy liquefy our brains. Shutting<br>off the thought process is not rejuvenating; the mind is like a car<br>battery-it...