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| Koppel recognizing the standing ovation from the crowd of over 2000 students and family members Photo credit: Marc Apter
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At 10 a.m. this morning Ted Koppel delivered the commencement address at St. Mary’s College of Maryland to the 416 graduates and their families. Koppel worked with ABC from 1963 until last year, he has received numerous awards, including thirty Emmy Awards, and was inducted into the Broadcasting Hall of Fame. Koppel resigned from “Nightline” in November, aged 66, but accepted the position of managing editor of The Discovery Channel. He also makes regular appearances as a commentator for NPR and writes columns for The New York Times. Below is his speech to the graduates about time and television.
“I want to talk to you today about time…and television…and the relevance of one to the other. Let’s talk first about TIME. There is…in each of us…just enough ego that we tend to regard time as something which is synonymous with our individual lifetime. We measure time in terms of our own experience. For some among you, the past 20 years represent, quite literally, a lifetime. For your younger brothers and sisters…it’s even more than that…it’s history. For your parents, your grandparents and me…it’s the blink of an eye. One of the most jarring aspects of getting older is the sudden retaliation that time does indeed pass just as quickly as our parents once said it did. Even within some of the younger amongst you here today, there is the gnawing sense that not all of life’s treasures lie ahead of you—that there is also something of value in what is past. You should be warned that it becomes increasingly easy, as you get older, to drown in nostalgia. In fact, you can almost measure where you are in life by the degree to which you have begun looking back rather than ahead. Some…among the very old…lose themselves completely in the past, presumably on the grounds that they no longer care…or dare to look ahead. Some…among the very young…lose themselves entirely in the future, perhaps in the expectation that there is always some promise in the unknown. Both are illusions. John Lennon once said, “Life is what happens while you’re making plans.” Time doesn’t pass. We do…hurtling across the face of a continuum. More than 75 years ago my father bought a small bronze…which I took into my home after he died. It’s the figure of a lithe young woman, head back…hair streaming out behind her, her whole body balanced on the ball of one foot, frozen in the act of running…endlessly running. The bronze is entitled “Fleeting Time.” But time doesn’t race by any more than that bronze has moved in the past 75 years. She stands absolutely still…frozen in the illusion of motion; and my entire family…my mother, my father, my wife, her mother and father…our children and I have raced past the motionless figure of Time, believing all the while that she was running and we were standing still.
“Life is what happens while you’re making plans.”
“The passing of a generation…the span of a lifetime…the difference between youth and middle-age…or the passage from middle-age to what is poetically referred to as the winter of our lives…passes as quickly as a sigh. And as we sweep past the figure of Time, we in the