I am sure many of you--I hope many of you--grew up reading books like Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree, The Light in the Attic, and Where the Sidewalk Ends. I hope, further, that your imagination was tickled to inquire where this place is where the sidewalk ends. You remember the poem [don't you?]:

"There is a place where the sidewalk ends

And before the street begins

And there the grass grows soft and white

And there the sun burns crimson bright

And there the moon-bird rests from his flight

To cool in the peppermint wind..."

Perhaps you have already noticed that. At least you have noticed that we do not have a McDonalds, nor gas stations that stay open after 6:00, nor do we have a Walmart, nor arcade, nor mall. Nor--as one freshman woman so astutely observed to me once as the reason why people are inclined to drink more at Sewanee--do we have a beach. I watched her for four years. She always seemed to be peeking around the sides of buildings and over the hills to find the beach. She seemed a perfect figure of existentialist alienation--existentialists are those people who have managed to persuade themselves that they have been personally betrayed by the whole damn universe. Part of what you need to know about Sewanee is that we don't have a beach.

The place is inconvenient sometimes. There are nights in the fog when I have been sent out the door by wife or daughter for diapers or tampons or Bryer's Neopolitan that I wish the Kroger or the Walmart were just down the road--not 15 miles down the mountain. There are days when I get a craving for hot pastrami sandwiches and Mississippi mudpie that I can't satisfy until I drive 60 miles to a little delicatessen in Chattanooga. And the best bookstore I know of around here is still 90 miles away in Nashville.

And it gets to you sometimes. Sometimes there is nothing that will cure the effect of the place but getting in the car and hitting the road. In my family we go to the Sonic drive-in a lot--just to watch the teenagers cruise and listen to the thousand watt speaker systems pulsing cars lowered to 3 inches off the ground. Ever so often, we have to hit the road big-time and head for lights and buildings taller than three stories. That means Chattanooga, Nashville, or the real Dixie big time: Atlanta. Fortunately none of these places is very far off. And fortunately Sewanee is still here when we get tired of playing bumper-tag on I-75 at Peachtree.

Sewanee is an irregular kind of place. I once described it as a Seussian place: a place where everything is connected--like the roads and bridges and arches in a Dr. Seuss story--but where nothing quite works. Sewanee does work, but not quite like you expect it to. The place has a high tolerance for the eccentric and the bizarre; all of Boo Radley's cousins seem to live within five miles of here. It is also a place fond of piecemeal renovations [Sewanee never fixes anything completely] that give you sidewalks that quite literally end, usually in mud. It is a kind of place that never quite manages to do things like other places do. Our airport--we do have an airport: Sewanee International-- is built so that the runways are crosswise to the prevailing winds. My pilot friend and fellow professor Tim Keith-Lucas of the psychology department [who flies me on aerial reconnaissance of fishing holes on the river] says that at Sewanee every landing is a controlled crash.

A couple of years ago our county, in a flit of modernistic rationalization, came up with the idea that it would be good to be like everywhere else and have a 911 system county-wide. 911 emergency phone systems require two things: you must have a phone and you must have an address. The phones weren't the problem. It was the addresses. Not only did none of our houses have numbers, but many of our streets had no names. Not only that, but Sewanee follows the quaint practice of identifying houses by the last names of their previous occupants: I live in the Engsberg House. Before that I lived in the Dorn house--which became the Smith house only when I moved out. Our fire, police, and EMS departments for years have learned to live with instructions that sound like this: "The Jones have a chimney fire in the Wilson house." One of the tests of a Sewanee emergency dispatcher is that they be able to translate the 911 address into the old form so that help can be sent quickly. This kind of thinking is not amenable to rational mapping--not even to rational explanation. Sewanee is just a kind of place that does not graph or chart very well.

We once had a fire truck that had been damaged with the result that it could only make left turns. Whenever there was a fire, the students--who in those days almost exclusively constituted the fire department--had to figure out a route to the fire that would allow the truck to get there only by turning left. It existed in that condition for several years and they in fact did quite well with it. We have long since replaced that fire truck, but it passed into both the lore and the experience of this place. People who live in a world of houses without numbers, streets without names, and fire trucks that only turn left develop high tolerance for the irregular.

If you come here and wander around just a bit you will find that, despite a flurry of construction projects the last few years, most of the sidewalks still end and the gravel and mud are not far away. You will find very quickly that Bean boots are not a fashion statement but a way of life here. The Vice-Chancellor said once, "Our environment is our major asset." That means we have a lot of greenspace. It also means we have a lot of weeds. Sewanee will never quite manage to be a place of manicured lawns. It is in fact a place of some substantial local wilderness. We are the only college in the nation that has a mountain rescue group that it uses on campus. But beyond the studied southern rusticity of buildings and roads and lawns there is a genuine naturalness about this place that becomes a seamless extension of classroom and lab. Your education here will be environmentally focused far beyond your science classes.

Over the years I have tried to understand Sewanee and find a comparative model to help me explain it. I wearied rather early in my Sewanee experience of those comparisons of Sewanee and Oxford. This is not Oxford. Not Oxford, England. And not Oxford, Mississippi--despite the best efforts of our village Don Quixote to make a windmill out of a flag. Perhaps a bit perversely, I find that I have looked much farther afield to understand Sewanee. I teach Comparative Religion and Sewanee has always struck me as a very Oriental kind of place--specifically a Taoist kind of place. In China, Taoism is one of the ancient philosophical schools--both the rival and the complement of Confucianism--and Taoism has always had a fascination with both mountains and poets. Taoism has been associated with rustic places and rustic poets.

The name of this philosophy is important: it is based upon the Chinese word "Tao" [Dow] though it looks like it should be pronounced "Ta-o". The word literally means path, footpath, trail, the place you put your feet. In its extended sense, it means cosmic path, natural law, the way. With this image as its basis, it is no surprise that Taoism sought expression more in natural imagery--wood, trees, water, grasses, stones, mountains, pathways--than in the urban social imagery so often used by the Confucians. Taoism is a kind of philosophy for the pathways where the sidewalk ends. Let me put it differently: rational social philosophy--the philosophy of state, kingship, court, ritual, duty, virtue--is important, but it is not enough. [Those of you who have read the Tao of Pooh or the Te of Piglet know a bit of what I am talking about here.]

Taoism was an alternative philosophy that reminded China that life cannot be fully measured in rules, government, plans, neat streets and gardens, rigid ritual. Confucianism is a philosophy of control through the virtue that internalizes duty in a bureaucratic society. And it is a very good philosophy for such matters. But over against civic virtues Taoism casts up the image of the water that seeks out the lowly places, the tree that bends before the wind, the army that runs away instead of standing to fight, the reclusive poet instead of the man of state. Where the Confucian gentleman sought the forum of public service expressed in meticulous statecraft, the Taoist sages as often wrapped themselves in tattered robes and wrote poems in a secluded huts in the mountains. Their wisdom was usually accessible only after a long and arduous journey along narrow footpaths in the mountains.

We must note carefully, very carefully, that the Taoists were not nature mystics as they are sometimes mis-represented in the west. They were the profoundest social philosophers of China--but they propounded a wisdom that I call katalogical: not illogical, not against logic, but beyond logic. They knew through primal reasoning that the ground of reason is not reason itself, but a meaning, a pattern in life and society and nature and the universe that exceeds reason, that cannot be reduced to quantity and explanation. They knew that there is more to learning than learning--which is why they characteristically resorted to poetry rather than to syllogism to express their ideas. They possessed the most ancient of all wisdom: "Those who speak don't know. Those who know don't speak." It is a wisdom echoed recently in western science by my mentor Michael Polanyi, a physical chemist and philosopher, who said, "We know more than we can tell."

The side walk, like the street, the market, the plaza, are all urban forms. They imply a different polity, civility, vision. We cannot live without cities and their forms of life--none of you will stay here; you will return to Atlanta, Birmingham, Chicago--but neither can we live without the wisdom of the poets, the sage teachers of the mountains. It is precisely our environment that is our greatest asset; we are not a city school. That doesn't mean that we are quaint or provincial or backward. We are in this place for a profound reason that has nothing to do with romantic delusions about nature. Here the sidewalk ends--and for the time being, for just long enough for it to make a permanent difference in your life, you tread a pathway, not a sidewalk.

Sewanee is not about sidewalks, nor even buildings; it is about the deep path--the Tao--represented in a dozen twisting routes through and around the forest of the Domain. This deep path, this hidden route, is my figure for the underlying meaning of education here: not in the obvious truths that graph and chart, that can be packaged and sold, that can be learned anywhere. The essence of Sewanee education lies in your capacity to follow a path, to see a hidden pattern when others would only see streets and walks. Sewanee education is not about hiking in an exotic place nor about the leisure of idle learning in the shelter of Arcadia; instead it is about understanding the pattern: the eternal pattern of things that gives meaning to all our ventures in the cities. When you leave here, you will know more than you can tell, and a few of you will have learned the wisdom of keeping silence.

There is another idea in Taoism as important as the path itself. It is this: the pattern is dynamic, not static; evolving, not complete. It is like the paths I follow along the riverbank: each spring after the winter floods have wiped out the old paths, the paths have to be made again--never in the same place. This is not an easy message about education: we can't sell you something and guarantee it forever; nor can we guarantee to you that Sewanee will never change. Liberal education is not a product that you can buy. The university is not like a factory. I cannot bear the sadness of my students who want us never to grow old, want Sewanee to be always as it was in 1968. The path is always changing. There is everywhere a touch of the incomplete, the unfinished, the mortally transient, about what we do.

There is one Confucian idea that has seemed relevant to me in this otherwise Taoist kind of place. Confucius once said that the highest devotion--hsiao or filial piety--consists in carrying out the unfinished work of our forefathers and in transmitting their achievements to posterity. This is, to my mind, a perfect description of tradition and a perfect description of the practice of liberal education at Sewanee. There is much that is unfinished that has been left to us: an unfinished place, an education that is a process and not a product, unfinished conversations in dorms and classes that carry over from year to year, and we invite you to join with us in transmitting this learning to posterity.

If you can live without Walmart and McDonald's and if you can tolerate a bit of gravel and more than a few weeds--and if your vision escapes the ordinary for yourself and your world--then Sewanee may be the place for you. For a while--for four rare and unique years--we will take you away from the "pits where the asphalt flowers grow" and let you sit in the grass and smell the peppermint wind. We invite you to a learning that is neither conventional nor static in its conception. At any good school you can learn all the information you are likely to acquire here; there is no reason to come here to get what you can get elsewhere. But Sewanee is not about what you can get elsewhere: its natural environment, its Anglican heritage, its devoted quirkiness, its genius set it apart from those places. But this genius is not found in a retreat from the world; if we retreat at all it is so that we gain thereby the knowledge and skills, and indeed, the urgency to transform the world.

Sewanee then is set apart by its vision--stated succinctly enough in the University's statement of purpose: to serve God and Man--a vision that has asked generations of Sewanee students to think about a life that is more than a profession or career. And within their professions and careers to think about what they do from a perspective that seeks the hidden meaning, that follows the deep path of wisdom and humanity. You don't come to Sewanee to learn what is in books; you come here to learn to walk the path that leads to wisdom for yourself and service to others. And this path always leads down from this mountain and back to the city.

Come join us, and

"Yes we'll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,

And we'll go where the chalk-white arrows go,

For the children, they mark, and the children, they know

The place where the sidewalk ends."

Welcome to Sewanee. Ecce Quam Bonum.

________________

Quotations from "Where the Sidewalk Ends" are taken from Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends, Harper and Row, (New York, 1974).