Members of the Class of 2025.
Hernán Díaz is a cosmopolitan. He spent the first 25 years of his life living in Sweden, Argentina, and London. In 1999, he moved to New York so that he could do graduate study at New York University. Right now he lives in Brooklyn.
During your second semester as a student at NYU Shanghai, in the spring of 2022, Hernán Díaz published his second novel, Trust. During your fourth semester as a student at NYU Shanghai, in the spring of 2023, Trust was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
The book tells the story of Andrew Bevel and Mildred Bevel, a fictional couple from 100 years ago. The book is unusual because it tells Andrew and Mildred’s story in four different ways:
First, through the words of Harold Vanner, a writer who wrote a nasty novel about them.
Second, through the words of Andrew Bevel himself, as he spoke them to a young typist-writer named Ida Partenza.
Third, through the words of Ida Partenza herself, as she describes her return to the Bevel home, which had been turned into a museum, 50 years after she worked for Andrew.
And fourth, through the words of Mildred Bevel, as she wrote them into a secret diary.
Trust is a magnificent novel, with a lot to say about wealth, power, art, relationships, and how we should think about “truth” when people are looking at the world from very different perspectives. But this morning I want to focus on just one sentence from the book.
The sentence comes in the section where Ida Partenza is speaking. She describes a moment when she told her father what it had been like to be a typist. She says, “The word I was typing was always in the past, while the word I was thinking of was always in the future, which left the present oddly uninhabited.”
Think about yourself right now. Your life as a student at NYU Shanghai is now in the past. The rest of your life is now in the future. The present, today, is “oddly uninhabited.”
The present is always a bridge between past and future. And much of the work of life is an effort to make that bridge meaningful. It is creating, and then re-creating, a story that links who you have been with who you will be, a story that is both authentic and gratifying.
How should you carry out that work of life? I have five modest suggestions to offer you today.
First, try to write a story that includes more characters than just yourself. The research on happiness shows clearly that the key to a meaningful life lies in your relationships with others – with family and friends. To be sure, relationships add challenges and difficulty, but at the end of the day people are meant to live shared lives.
Second, try to write a story that has several sub-plots. If you focus on just one thing, you might do that one thing better than if you are doing several different kinds of things. But you probably won’t. And you will definitely be a boring person.
Third, try to write a story that is set in more than one location. Your experience at NYU Shanghai has pushed you to live in two or three of the world’s great cities. You know how stimulating it is to implant yourself into a new place. Make sure you keep experiencing that kind of stimulation.
Fourth, write a story that is partly a comedy. Don’t take yourself too seriously. And understand that the essence of great comedy is surprise. I promise you that your life will include many, many surprises. Be ready for them, and be ready to find the humor in those surprises that are disappointing because, inevitably, they will come.
Fifth, and most importantly, whenever you rewrite your story, link your past to more than one possible future. Don’t try to create a rigid life plan that will go from A to B to C to D. Instead, understand that there is no way to be confident about what your life will be like in ten years. Think about how you might spend your next two or three years well, and then in two or three years plan to do it again.
If you continuously re-write your story with those five suggestions in mind, you will notice something surprising. As you re-write your story over the years, what you say about your past will change. At the age of 22, you will write one thing about what it was like when you were ten years old. When you re-write your story at age 32, you will say something different about what it was like when you were ten. And when you re-write it again at age 42, your understanding of your childhood will have changed once more. Life will keep bringing you new insights into your own past. Relish those insights. Be grateful for them.
Members of the NYU Shanghai Class of 2025, as you embark on lives of worth and purpose, lives of service to a world that desperately needs you, let me conclude by sharing a few hopes that we, your teachers, hold for you:
May you enjoy the special pleasures of craft — the private satisfaction of doing a task as well as it can be done.
May you enjoy the special pleasures of profession — the added satisfaction of knowing that your efforts promote a larger public good.
May you be blessed with good luck, and also with the wisdom to appreciate when you have been lucky rather than skillful.
May you find ways to help others under circumstances where they cannot possibly know that you have done so.
May you be patient, and gentle, and tolerant, without becoming smug, self-satisfied, or arrogant.
May you always be able to confess ignorance, doubt, vulnerability, and uncertainty.
May you build long and loving relationships with people whom you respect and trust.
May you be an author who writes and re-writes a satisfying story that connects your past to your future in authentic and gratifying ways.
May you know enough bad weather that you never take sunshine for granted, and enough good weather that your faith in the coming of spring is never shaken.
May you be able to travel frequently beyond the places that are comfortable and familiar, so that your appreciation for the miraculous diversity of life grows ever stronger.
And may your steps lead you often back to Shanghai. Back to Pudong. Back to the New Bund. For you will always be members of the NYU Shanghai family. And we will always be happy to welcome you home.
Congratulations.