An immigrants view of enduring values

5.29.2025

It was another rainy day in the Berkshires and I was surfing the web when I learned that Abraham Verghese had recently given the commencement address at Harvard. I found the valedictory address on YouTube and took a few notes. Then I found the transcript.

Here are my Take-Home messages from the address; but if you are interested, you can follow the hypertext links above to see the oration and/or read the transcript.

Novels can teach you powerful lessons about life in a manner quite different than a movie might teach you. That’s because a novel is a collaborative venture: the writer provides the words, the reader provides his or her imagination and a mental movie unfolds in the reader’s brain… When a novel speaks to you, it’s because it rings true.

To paraphrase Camus, fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives. When a novel speaks to you, it’s because it rings true.

Graduates, the commencement ritual obliges me to offer advice, even though in forty-years as of being a professor attending every graduation, I remember so little of what was said. But advice is part of this ritual. I’ve already slipped in one piece of advice, and that is to read fiction. It’s a trait of some of the best physicians and leaders I have met, including your President, I mean your university’s President. And if you don’t read fiction, my considered medical opinion is that a part of your brain responsible for active imagination atrophies.

I’ll leave you with two other pieces of advice: one has to do with decisions and the other with time. First let me tell you about Decisions. There’s a writing aphorism I just love, about how to create a fictional character, and it goes like this, Character is determined by decisions taken under pressure.

Love trumps all bigotry, love trumps ideology when it is your child, your family member that is affected, all that stuff flies out the window.

Meaning at the end of a shortened life did not reside in fame, power, reputation, acquisitions, or good looks. Instead they found that meaning in their lives ultimately resided in the successful relationships that they had forged in a lifetime, particularly with parents. particularly with family.