It’s coming up on college graduation season, and I admit, I haven’t thought about commencement speeches in a long while. I graduated from Boston University in 1999 (high fives to Elisa and Jen “Littlepear”, who also graduated from BU in ’99!). Our commencement speaker that year was Henry Kissinger, and it was an appalling speech. He made an a$$-licking reference to the school’s chancellor, John Silber, and that’s about all I remember from it. And I covered that speech for the Associated Press, my then-employer! I was taking notes and duly relayed quotes to my editor, but today, now, if you held a gun to my head, I couldn’t remember a single inspiring thing he said. I could Google it, but I don’t care enough about the ol’ war criminal (allegedly!) to do so.

I do, however, remember our class speaker, a young woman named Jenny Gruber who was graduating with a combined undergraduate/masters in something like aeronautical engineering and had won a Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford. She also lived in my building our mutual senior years, and she was (I presume is still) a lovely woman.  She grew up in a Nebraska trailer park, talked about watching her mother struggle to study for her undergraduate degree in teaching, doing homework at the kitchen table. It was a speech filled with beautiful enthusiasm for learning and adventure and gratitude for those who helped her on her way, and that was inspiring.

As I say, I hadn’t thought much about college commencement speeches since 1999, but Gawker linked to a few great speeches, including this one given by Kurt Vonnegut in 1998 at Rice University. Geez, I wish we’d been lucky enough to get this speech, because it was so moving it brought me to tears. Or I’m just hormonal. I allow for that. I’d love to plop the whole thing down here, but I’ll just do the beginning and the end.

Hello.
For those of you getting your first university degrees, I like your generation a lot, and I expect good things from you, and wish you well.

This is a long-delayed puberty ceremony. You are at last officially full-grown men and women -- what you were biologically by the age of fifteen or so. I am sorry as I can be that it took so long and cost so much for you to at last receive licenses as grownups.

I have not calculated how much your diplomas cost in time and money. Whatever those ballpark figures are, they surely deserve this reaction from me today: Wow. Wow. Wow.

Thank you, and God bless you and those who made it possible for you to study at this great American university. By becoming informed and reasonable and capable adults, you have made this a better world than it was before you got here.

Have we met before? No. But I have thought a lot about people like you. You men here are Adam. You women are Eve. Who hasn't thought a lot about Adam and Eve?

This is Eden, and you're about to be kicked out. Why? You ate the knowledge apple. It's in your tummies now.

And who am I? I used to be Adam. But now I am Methuselah.

And who is a serpent among us? Anyone who would strike a child.

So what does this Methuselah have to say to you, since he has lived so long? I'll pass on to you what another Methuselah said to me. He's Joe Heller, author, as you know, of Catch 22. We were at a party thrown by a multi-billionaire out on Long Island, and I said, ''Joe, how does it make you feel to realize that only yesterday our host probably made more money than Catch 22, one of the most popular books of all time, has grossed world-wide over the past forty years?''

Joe said to me, ''I have something he can never have.''

I said, ''What's that, Joe?''

And he said, ''The knowledge that I've got enough.''