MacArthur "Genius Award" winner and author Jonathan Lethem '86 addresses the Class of 2005

All Paths to Nowhere Lead to Rome

by Jonathan Lethem '86

Recently recognized for his talent with a MacArthur "genius" award, Bennington alumnus Jonathan Lethem '86 returned to campus in June and declared, "I'm a sophomore on leave," during his commencement speech. Below are excerpts of Lethem's remarks.

I didn't admit to my friends or my father or myself that I was leaving for good-I was simply a sophomore, going on leave to write a book, leaving behind a place that had aroused and challenged and intimidated me, a decision that I kept quarantined in a thick coating of irony.

Now, as I search for words adequate to this occasion I can't locate that irony at all. Your graduation today seems to me an ineffably beautiful thing, you all seem as scrubbed clean of irony as newborn babies, and before you decide you don't like the sound of that let me say that, I feel like a newborn baby today, too. These ceremonies stir us at such depths because they are among those rare moments in life that can only happen once, like birth or death, like leaving your native soil for a first encounter with a foreign country. By bringing me here to congratulate and honor you, by calling me here to speak to you in the middle of my sophomore year, you've also provided me with one of those moments and I thank you for it.

And I am supposed to provide you with advice. Honestly, an uncomfortable assignment, but beautifully risky, a kind of high-wire act for everyone involved-because I am going to have to risk giving you advice and you're going to have to risk listening to it.

The first advice that mattered to me was the phrase: "All paths lead nowhere, choose one with heart," which as a child I heard repeated often by my parents' friend. "All paths lead nowhere, choose one with a heart," would seem to have a kind of Buddhist placidity and calm to it, and it may in fact have been a paraphrase of some guru of the east, but in [the] mouth [of my parents' friend] it had a Brooklyn toughness, an impatience that suggested you were a moron if you didn't already know that all paths lead nowhere and that anyone with any sense at all could recognize a path with heart.

Another piece of advice, so dense and aphoristic and familiar that it can be easy to forget that it is advice: "All roads lead to Rome." When I was younger I took this literally, as a description of an ancient world that had been outgrown-I figured all roads no longer led to Rome, and I was free to go where I chose. I was much more interested in paths that led nowhere, and in choosing one with heart. In my urge to be unconventional I figured Rome was the last place I'd go, an attitude that, paradoxically, led me both to the choice of Bennington College and to dropping out of Bennington College. Yet here I am, on graduation day, which is a kind of Rome, and one to which my road has seemingly inevitably led. And here you are, on graduation day, the Rome at the end of the road you quite possibly felt led elsewhere, or nowhere. If you're anything like me, you hardly expected to be here. Perhaps, then, Rome is birth, and death, and marriage, and graduation day, the destination we hardly need to bother trying for, the inevitable city of the horizon of the path to nowhere. You see it coming a mile away, but the point is the means by which you got there. I fall roads lead to Rome, then the point is the one you chose, the path to nowhere, was chosen with heart.

More advice: "You choose your battles." Of course, if all roads lead to Rome, and they do, then most of your battles have chosen you before you had the chance to consider otherwise. You were up to your neck in battles chosen before you understood you were choosing: battles ethical, aesthetic, sexual, political, battles at the very frontier where your self meets the world, battles with the mundane stuff of existence, which seems to make its own demands. Today is commencement day, yet we'd better acknowledge that most everything else besides this particular day commenced before we came along, that a world of battles has been underway that we were merely born to. Yet you still get to choose the battles you'll call your own, the battles you'll embrace and be defined by, the way you were defined by coming to this place to live and work and play, the way it was a battle you'd chosen before you knew it, a road to Rome when you'd never said to yourself clearly that you wanted to get to Rome. In other words, you've already chosen: now choose. You're well in the thick of anything I could possibly advise you to ready yourselves for.

So go ahead and follow in my footsteps and put this place behind you-or try, anyway. Abandon Rome, if you think you can. You'll be back, again and again you'll be back, because this is the Rome inside you, a place where you came to make yourselves and one another ready to leave, and in doing so made it a place you'll never finish leaving.