I think Salvador Dali gave the shortest speech when he said "I will be so brief, I have already finished." I can't promise to be that brief, but I will do my best. Good morning, everyone, I speak today on behalf of the undergraduates and I would like to thank you all for getting up early and coming out to support the graduating class of 2006. It is an honor to share this day with you. 
 
Franz Kafka wrote: "I think we ought to only read the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into the forest far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us."
 
I'm sure everyone here has experienced at least one book like this. However, the faculty you see sitting with me on stage and in the audience, and the students you see wearing caps and gowns have all dedicated their lives and college careers to hacking away at this frozen sea. Some of us have succeeded and most of us are just beginning to learn how to use this axe. 
 
I leave ECU's Department of English having done my fair share of masochistic reading. I've experienced literature the way Kafka says we should and I know my fellow graduates share in my passion for such books. Some of us are headed to graduate school, some of us are going to take a year off, some of us will slave away inside a cubicle from nine to five. But no matter where you are headed after today, you still hold the axe. Use it to defend the position of literature in today's power-point society. Take those books that have left you exhausted, infuriated, stimulated, and remind the world of the extraordinary illumination they offer to us. We may not get paid much to do this; in fact, some of us will probably be on food stamps in graduate school and we will spend more money on books than we do on rent. But this is what we sacrifice for the written word. We are all readers, writers, and lovers of literature, and who could ask for a better lover?
 
Once again, thank you all for supporting the English graduates and their endeavors to carry the literary axe throughout the rest of their careers.