At its margins, human life dissolves into banality. Our milestone moments seem to invite other people to hang on them millstones of ponderous rhetoric of which few ever question the desirability or even the necessity. Having for family reasons just attended commencement exercises at New York University, I can report, for instance, that the jazz musician and impresario Quincy Jones believes that racial stereotyping is “stupid” and is prepared to provide at length several examples of this stupidity—in case, presumably, you happen to be stupid —and that the retiring Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin, has learned that “The only thing certain is that there is no certainty.” Therefore, says Mr. Rubin, we “need to be decisive in the face of uncertainty” and recognize that “good decision-making is the key to good outcomes.” This was said on the day that his own decision to resign as Treasury Secretary was announced, but there nevertheless appeared no larger significance to the observation.

Rubin also said that he believed there were “no absolutes” and that in this belief he was “supported by modern science.” He might have added that he was also supported by modern politics, at least as practiced by his boss, Bill Clinton. But one absolute that seems to have escaped the hecatomb of sacred cows is that at graduations, as at other times of separation—“marriage, and birth, and death, and thoughts of these,” as Larkin says—even the excellent Mr. Rubin is left with nothing to say but the obvious, the