For the commencement address file

Here’s some grist for the commencement address file that you ought to be building already. It comes from a character in Down There on A Visit, the 1962 novel by Christopher Isherwood, who also wrote A Single Man.

I see my twenty-three-year-old face regarding me with large, reproachful eyes, from beneath a cowlick of streaky blond hair. A thin, strained face, so touchingly pretty that it might have been photographed and blown up big for a poster appealing on behalf of the world’s young. “The old hate us because we’re so cute. Won’t YOU help?”