“I’ve never believed, not for one second, that art is created out of avoiding the world and its…

“I’ve never believed, not for one second, that art is created out of avoiding the world and its various realities.”

I’ve never believed, not for one second, that art is created out of avoiding the world and its various realities. If you avoid that, you avoid life, which is your source material, you dishonor all your ghosts in the sunlight, including the person you were when I began this speech, the Columbia boys I knew and loved long ago, the politically oppressed poet who changed a face, and you, dancing with my former self before we part, and you walk proudly into your sunlit hope, ghosts and all.

-Hilton Als gave a dreamer’s commencement speech at Columbia — if only every kid got to hear this sort of intense, fervid creative validation! — now published in the New York Review of Books as “Ghosts in Sunlight.”