Whitehead closed his speech by turning the vastness of the universe — which he had spent the speech using to comic and somewhat terrifying effect (your soulmate is probably dead, your guiding star may be a black hole) — into a source of unexpected comfort. The 'multitude' wasn't out there in the cosmos; it was inside each graduate. The 'many you's' were the accumulated selves of a lifetime: the four-year-old first apprehending the otherness of other people, the fourteen-year-old recognizing themselves in Shakespeare, the graduate sitting in the audience, and all the future selves at 25, 45, and 65 — 'adapting, pratfalling, and picking themselves up.' Each version carries its own lessons and its own resilience. It was a deeply literary conclusion from one of America's finest novelists: the idea that the self is not a single character but an ensemble cast, and that at the critical moments of life's third act, one of those many selves will know what to do. 'Congratulations on finishing Act I,' Whitehead told them. 'Welcome to the complications.'