Hilton Als, essayist and longtime theater critic at The New Yorker, gave the commencement speech to this year’s graduates at Columbia’s School of the Arts. He manages to perfectly capture hope and loss as he experienced it as a student there during the dawn of the AIDS pandemic:

I wonder if you, like me, feel, just now, like a ghost in the sunlight, awash in memories as your life shifts from student to professional, and your professors become your colleagues. I’ll pull rank now–but just for a moment–and say that my ghosts are probably older than yours. I mean almost Madonna old, and her 1980s music is there in my reminiscences along with so much more as I recall that the majority of my ghosts became just that during the AIDS crisis, which I first read about while I was a student at Columbia–in 1981 or so. I met those now gone boys at Columbia some time before I met you. In memory they wear what they wore then: Oxford button-downs, and they smoke and gossip in the sun that always makes the steps of Low Library–the very steps you’ve sat on yourself–look like a sketch in a dream. Tomorrow was faraway then. And then it wasn’t.

Read more at the New York Review of Books.