Joan Didion, I’ve long thought, wrote out of her own sensibility as much as out of what she did and saw. This is the key tension in her work, between Didion as character and Didion as observer, between the subjectivity of her voice and eye and the details—the facts, if you will—on the ground. What’s remarkable about this piece of writing, a long-lost commencement address given at UC Riverside in 1975, is how she cops to that, the way she asserts, for both writers and nonwriters, the necessity of not just recognizing but also actively challenging our preconceptions, what we take for granted in the world. “We all distort what we see,” she tells the students. “We all have to struggle to see what’s really going on.” What Didion is really addressing is the necessity of remaining engaged and awake, of thinking for ourselves, of recognizing the world as what it is, rather than what we wish it might be.
I’ve never talked to this many people, but this is not my first engagement as a commencement lecturer. I spoke at my eighth-grade graduation in 1948, and my topic then was “Our California Heritage.” I was graduating that year from an elementary school in Sacramento County that was in a district that was just in the process of changing from rural to suburban. You know, the kind of school in which some of us had sheepdogs—dogs that ran sheep—and some of us had fancy Old English Sheepdogs.
When my talk on our California heritage began, my mother saved it for me. It was written out in pencil: “One hundred years ago our great-great-grandparents were pushing America’s frontier westward to California. Those who came to California were not the self-satisfied, happy, and content, but the adventurous, the restless, and the daring. They were different even from those who settled in the other western states; they didn’t come for homes and security, but for adventure and money.”
There was more in that rather predictable vein. There was a part about how our great-grandparents had pushed over the mountains and built golden cities. And there was the part about how those great-great-grandparents of ours had come to make a killing instead of a community, that maybe there might
