Fujimura built his speech around a stunning description of a theatrical production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, in which the producers surprised the audience by cooking real bacon and eggs on a hidden backstage—filling the theater with aroma during the scene where the dead Emily returns to relive her twelfth birthday. The smell was real, and it posed powerful questions about the nature of reality and art. Fujimura used this experience to argue that art engages our senses to point beyond the visible world to a greater reality—what he called 'the Stage behind the stage.' Rather than dismissing artistic experience as idealistic enchantment before returning to pragmatic reality, Fujimura urged the graduates to recognize that beauty, sensation, and creative expression already contain within them an intimation of the world as it ought to be. As a Nihonga painter who works with pulverized gold and platinum—materials that must be pounded to become beautiful—he saw in the creative process itself a metaphor for how meaning emerges through suffering.