13 June 2003 - Immanent Valedictorians

The mystery of the valedictorian can never be fathomed; it is too shallow. For transcendence is the only prospect of the audience—transcendence, which surpasses and encompasses, which elects and commits with a sophisticated sophistry unemployable by the highest grade-earner. Concerning the speech which has just passed, our valedictorian has poured forth and declaimed so diminutive a number of ideas that the patience of a tin ear and the capacity of a voice recorder would be wasted by it.

— Bulwer-Lytton Strachey, Immanent Valedictorians