A couple of weeks ago I had the honor of delivering the commencement address to the graduating class of King College in Bristol, TN. It’s a strange, rather daunting genre. I took brevity to be one of the primary virtues of such a talk. And given that I was in the middle of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King while writing this–and that his own Kenyon College commencement address was rumbling around in my head–I was worried about being entirely derivative (and a bit of a downer). But when I got the invitation last fall, I immediately remembered a note I had scribbled in my moleskin almost two years ago and was able to give them the title immediately: “Dream Small.”