Welcome to the Impossible World  Consider yourself an honorary
graduate of the Internet University of hard knocks, mixed
metaphors, and strange analogies.  | Sat May. 13, 2006 11:00 PM
GMT  [Note: This is the text of the 2006 commencement address
for the Department of English at the University of California at
Berkeley.]  Some of you here today receiving degrees took time
off to explore the world, work for a cause, or earn enough money
to get to college, but I suspect the great majority of you went
straight through from high school and thus were likely born in
1984. What does it mean to be born in 1984, the ominous year
that hung over humanity for 36 years after George Orwell made
those four numbers a synonym for totalitarianism; what does it
mean to be born atop the high wall at the end of the grim future
of the imagination?  Advertise on MotherJones.com  I thought of
that as soon as I was invited to give this talk, thought about
the enormous gap between when Orwell, on the beautiful isle of
Jura in Scotland