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ROMARE BEARDEN HOFSTRA COMMENCEMENT SPEECH 5/17/82

Dr. Samuel Johnson once said there were only three books that he wished were longer: Robinson Crusoe, Pilgrim's Progress and Don Quixote. I cannot, however, think of anyone who would wish a commencement address prolonged, so I shall be brief.

Let me speak to you today as an artist, and since this is a graduating class in the humanities, return imaginatively with me to Paris, where not long after World War II, I was a student there - a beneficiary of the G.I. Bill. I lived then in a pension, in one of the three top floor skylight studios which were reserved for artists. My rental with meals came out to about thirty-five dollars a month. Nearby the pension was the old laboratory of Louis Pasteur, the home of César Franck, and a small building where it was said that Victor Hugo wrote parts of Les Miserables.

As I walked to my morning classes at the Sorbonne, I saw pit marks of machine gun bullets on a number of structures, and, also, quite a few small plaques marking the spot where a resistance fighter had fallen in the battle to liberate Paris. Most of us knew that when some German soldiers came to Picaso's studio an officer pointing to the Guernica asked the artist: "Who did that?" and Picasso replied: "You did". We were told the story of the French writer who when the Gestapo arrested him said to his wife: "This is the end of fear. We must now believe in hope". And with the hope of liberation fulfilled, and Paris no longer under the jackboot, people were closing their eyes on despair and opening them on desire: Notre Dame and other landmark buildings were lighted at night, the large white asparagus were coming up from the South and the perfumed strawberries from North Africa, young couples were everywhere in their own universe of love, and, now, a lady in a new spring dress. Paris had decided to become beautiful again. It was on one of those well-favored days in May when certain emotional