How I Learned From a Teacher What Artists Do

"How I Learned From a Teacher What Artists Do" is the title given in If This Isn't Nice, What Is? to a commencement address given at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York on May 8, 1994.

Summary

Kenneth A. Shaw quadrangle, Syracuse University

Vonnegut wishes to convey three main messages: thank you, sorry, and we love you. He asks all in attendance to remember a teacher they had who made life more interesting and thanks them for becoming educated. This is in fact a puberty ceremony, acknowledging the graduates' adulthood, although there may be some "old poops" who insist an adult must first live through a major calamity like war. Storytellers are the source of "this destructive, not to say suicidal, myth" that maturity only comes after surviving a terrible disaster. Vonnegut apologizes for the current state of the world, but it has always been a mess and there were never any "Good Old Days". Instead, he declares all in attendance a part of Generation A, constituting at least for these few hours an artificial extended family.

This gather is now a work of art. The good teacher Vonnegut thought of once told him artist are people who admit they can't fix the universe but can make a small part of it exactly as it should be. Everyone here has worked hard to make this moment in this place as it should be. Unlike his "bad uncle" Dan, who thought a man wasn't a man until after war, Vonnegut's "good uncle" Alex who tried to stop and notice when life was pleasant and he advises the graduates to do the same. Instead of pointing to the glories of the part or promise of the future, everyone should celebrate this moment and what it took to get here. Once when Vonnegut hired a neighbor to build an extension to his house, which he did by himself. Afterward, looking at the finished work, he asked himself how he could have done that. Fulfilling his promise, he tell the graduates "We love you".