Ivan Manolov
A Commitment to Dreams
President Schapiro, Trustees, Honored guests, families, friends, and members of the class of 2005:
I am here today to tell you a story. In some ways, it is not a typical story: it doesn’t have a beginning or an end, and it is not really in chronological order. But I am sure that you will recognize it. It has played out many times before, century after century, and it will again. Some of you might think that, in a way, I created this story and somehow own it. That could not be further from the truth. The story created me and gave me the honor to put it into words one more time.
Sixteen years ago, when I was entering the first grade, I received a ribbon, a red ribbon, to tie to my shirt. I knew what the ribbon meant. I was now a young pioneer of communism, one of those expected to build a bright future for my fatherland, Bulgaria. Luckily, I was relieved of this lofty mission several months later, when Bulgaria’s communist regime collapsed, along with the governments of at least a dozen other Soviet satellites.
For me and my fellow schoolmates, the party began. In school and on the street, there were now many fewer rules than there had been before. The educators weren’t sure anymore which history they were supposed to feed us. The teaching of Russian abruptly ceased and we started learning Western languages and devouring books our parents were never allowed to read. There was no church to preach morality to us, patriotism was a joke, and even money was losing value by the day, because the government had yet to learn to keep its hands off the printing press. For the most part, we children found this situation highly amusing.
But our parents weren’t laughing. From their point of view, little had changed. The buildings around them were still the same shade of gray, and the cities and countryside of Bulgaria were littered with the rusty skeletons of half-built factories that would never be finished – decaying remnants from the bright future. Our parents did not believe in the future anymore. Someone called them the Lost Generation, and so they lost their past as well, as they cast aside all respect for the failed social experiment of the previous fifty years.
The time of big ideas for my country was over and our parents now had to struggle to make ends meet. I don’t think that worried them much. Poverty was OK – they could laugh it out, like we children did. What worried them was that they might have little to teach us. There wasn’t much about their existence that was educational in the traditional sense of the word. Post-1989 society and the recent past offered few role models they would have liked us to emulate.
And in the midst of hopelessness, they did the very best thing they could have done. They taught us how to dream but otherwise they gave us a blank slate. They did not try to instill in us a false morality. We had in front of us a new beginning, a world that had been destroyed and was therefore somehow beautifully free. And our parents told us, “Build it anew. Do not become the slaves of other people’s values. Your only allegiance is to your own dreams.” Inspired, we children scattered around the world and began to fill the white pages that we had been handed. Some opened books that had stayed closed for a long time; others learned complicated equations and stared through telescopes at the distant stars.
I myself took a 6,000 mile journey to a small town in New England. I have been extremely lucky to come here to Williams and find professors whose enthusiasm for Latin squares or soap bubbles or whose tendency to get goose bumps when they speak of important discoveries have given substance and joy to my process of dreammaking.
Fellow classmates,
The story I have told you is not new. It is the story of human beings struggling to make gray give way to color. Look inwards and you will find that you too are being asked to build the world anew. Like the famous sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski put it, your sense of beauty will one day want to know: Did you do the job? And the only answer is yes.
Thank you for listening to me today and thank you, Williams College.
Ivan S. Manolov, Valedictorian
Williams College Commencement, June 5, 2005