My original notes for this introductory section read: “Paragraph on the existential nexus of this weekend: tension, excitement, nausea, hope”. Gad. Is that what I am supposed to talk about? Let me put it another way:

You have to be a little bit crazy just to be here tonight, to be considering coming to a place like this at all. You know there is nothing here, right? No QuickMart, no mall, no bars, no all-night drugstore, no beach. No cable. You will be here for about nine months of the year and it rains for four of those. You will be doing the most insane of all human projects-deliberately exiling yourself from all you love you to go live with a bunch of strangers who are all smarter than you and think you are from someplace odd and dress funny. And next you will have to room with one of them. And then you will go off to your first class, think you are in history until the professor starts speaking Russian and then realize that you are in the wrong building on the wrong day. And then just to keep from tipping your hand, you will take notes in a language you don’t understand. You will have a moment or two, probably about the second day you are here when you wake up in a strange room and get nearly sick at your stomach and wonder to yourself, “My God, what have I gone and done.” You may even be wondering that right now. Never mind, thousands have preceded you with all the misgivings and trepidation you feel--and with something else--the “whatever-it-was” that made you look at us one more time when you could have gone to Davidson--or gone to Auburn and made really good grades.

It is ok to be a bit crazy. Sewanee is like a disease, you catch it from somebody and you are infected and even when your fever goes down, you are still sick with the place [not sick OF], and you keep coming back forever just to smell the mold and wander in the fog.
And it is ok to have misgivings tonight. Picking a school, a university, is a lot like picking a mother tongue: by the time you have the skills and the conceptual awareness to make a rational choice about it, it is too late and the issue is already decided. You can’t know in advance if Sewanee is the wrong school for you. This is not just the kind of uncertainty you felt this afternoon when you were going through your bag to decide on what to wear tonight; it is not the kind of uncertainty you feel when you don’t know whether to take English or history. The uncertainty I am speaking of here goes a lot deeper: it is what we call an existential uncertainty-angst, the philosophers call it-a great and deep dread. The kind of sneaky hunch that the whole thing called education is a crap shoot designed by Angelica Pickles or Lucy Brown and has been designed just to punish and torment you. This uncertainty is a basic and pervasive doubt about your place in the scheme of things: not just fitting in with your friends, but fitting in with the cosmos. And I would suggest to you that, as troubling as it might be, this particular kind of uncertainty is at the core of liberal education.

Let’s come at this uncertainty and doubt another way. I wonder if any of you have read David James Duncan's book, The River Why? It has a sort of incidental connection via bourbon and Andrew Lytle to Sewanee, but that is not the connection I want to make. It is a Sewanee book even though its setting is very different and far away from the Cumberland Plateau. Here, let me recall it for you. It is the story of a young man, Gus, [whom we discover is from a VERY peculiar family] who goes flyfishing and while he is fishing has an encounter that changes his life. He is fishing along the banks of a small western trout stream and sees ahead of him a woman who is also flyfishing--but she is not wading as he is. She is standing above the river on the limb of a tree, fishing, working a big fish in the pool below her. And one more thing: as the fish [a beautiful sea-run rainbow trout called a steelhead] begins to run out her line, she sheds her clothes and dives into the river totally naked to swim after the fish. [You entrepreneurs can run out and make a T-shirt: "FlyFish Naked"]

As you might imagine as in any good story, the girl shows up again and in fact the whole of the story is pretty much Gus’ compulsion to find her. His quest to find her leads in and out of a variety of situations including reconciliation to his very odd family, finding a settled way to live in harmony with his environment, rescue the very last trout living in Los Angeles, overcome self-doubt and cosmic uncertainty, AND at last find the girl. All along the way, he encounters interesting characters of the hippie persuasion, has a dream episode with his little brother that may be one of the best things since Tolkien, and meets a dog named Descartes. While the narrative line is psycho-tropic, the suspense is perfect and Duncan liberally sprinkles the book with quotations from seers, mystics, and poets. The book is worth the concatenation of quotes alone. It is a hell of a story and you ought to read it.

It is one of those books of a genre that has a long lineage--if not quite in the Song of Solomon, at least in St. Augustine's City of God and in works like Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. More recent affinities could be found in Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Tom Robbins’ Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, and especially in Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I like all these books because, to my twisted mind at least, they all connect with the purpose of liberal arts education. And I think that is particularly the case with The River Why.

These are not just pilgrimage books; I would characterize them more accurately as "quest" books, books that tell a story about vision, passion, and a distant goal--symbolized here for Duncan in the beautiful maiden flyfishing naked in a tree. The symbolism is rich: she is at once and also more than the siren, the orphaned princess, the temptress, the angelic visitor; the perfect lover. And Gus’ journey is like that of the classic hero described so well by Joseph Campbell in The Hero With A Thousand Faces: a simultaneous, double helical journey outward and within-a quest for an outward goal that brings the pilgrim to an encounter deep within the psyche. A dual journey, outside and inside, spiraling, twisting on itself until dramatic action and self-realization become one in a final denouement of revelation, reconciliation, restoration, and redemption. [If you didn’t get that down in your notes, never mind; I have it on the web.] A quest. And he finds the girl-but more of that later.

For a few minutes here, let me play a bit with this complex symbolism of the maiden and the river and use it as an occasion to reflect a bit on college and life-and why you might want to come to Sewanee and what you might expect when you get here.

Let me suggest this thesis then: college is a lot like flyfishing on the river “why” of Duncan’s book-it is a crooked river, there are lots of rapids, snags, and ledges, and the water is cold. And most days you don’t land the big one. I think of all the things I have done I like flyfishing the best [with the possible exception of turkey hunting]. I like it because it is not predictable, because it requires a complexly integrated knowledge, it requires delicate skill (even art), and its reward is in the doing and being there not in what you can carry home in a bucket or hang on your wall.

If you are looking for a monster trophy to hang on the wall, if you want immediate results, if you want a guaranteed catch, flyfishing is not for you-and Sewanee probably isn’t for you either. If you flyfish, but especially if you come to college here, you need to love crooked rivers, cold water, and, yes, a bit of fog. Most of the time, of course, the fog is outside-but every now and again, a professor will open the window and you’ll get fog on the inside. On those days, just remember: I told you college is a lot like flyfishing.

Now I know that the trophy is a big deal-this weekend itself is a great trophy hunt. And I know that your parents especially want to know that you are going to have the big one-your diploma-to hang on the wall if they spend all that money to send you here. That’s ok. Well, up to a point. Certainly you need to have some sense of achievement for coming here and some sense that your and your parents’ expectations will be fulfilled. But any college ought to allow you to catch that fish. If you come to Sewanee, you need to learn a different kind of fishing-where the success is not measured in the catch but in the fishing.

Also, you have to know that what you catch OR if you catch anything at all, doesn’t matter. It does not matter what you major in, what your g.p.a. is, or how many trophies of what ever sort you win to go on the wall. If that is your game, you might as well look for another river. Sewanee is a crooked, cold river and we are not fishing here for bass, catfish, or carp. It is not even about the fish: it is about the river and all the uncertainty that comes from setting yourself to a task in so indeterminate an environment.

More importantly, however, in both flyfishing and in liberal education, there is an irreducible element of uncertainty. Part of the uncertainty is ambiguity. And this is not an element that we tolerate because we are sloppy thinkers or because we are just a bit lazy about cleaning up our notes or speaking precisely. No. It is an element that is there because it belongs to the nature of knowledge itself and we would not remove it if we could. In flyfishing and the liberal arts, you have to take a lot on faith, and if you are going to be good at either, you have to love each for its own sake.

What does this all mean? Why am I talking about uncertainty and ambiguity? I talk about these things because many of us who teach here have collided with the limits of knowledge and we know that the most important things you will learn here cannot be specified in advance, cannot be pre-packaged for you, cannot be handed to you in a book or in a syllabus. We have ourselves learned and so teach in recognition of the truth that education is more than books and classes, more than what can be determined by testing. That is in part why we invite you to come here for this weekend. All your scores are good-you wouldn’t be here if they weren’t-but we still don’t really know if you are worth keeping until we make some of those indeterminate assessments that SAT and ACT can never touch.

In fact, we have learned so well the lesson of the importance of uncertainty and ambiguity that we will ask, force, you to think for yourselves instead of handing you either the answer or the pathway to finding it. You may come to class one day and find a pile of sealed boxes that you have to inventory-without opening them. You may stay up one night studying for a biology quiz and come into class only to be handed a paper bag and be asked to write its life history. Or you may find yourself in a class that asks you to rappel down through an Appalachian dump and then queries you about global poverty while you try to make yourself comfortable sitting in garbage. This is not the bizarre for the sake of pointless novelty. Here you will find teachers who again and again because of their own research and passion for what they do collide with the epistemological and moral limits of certainty and know that known truth is only yesterday’s sigh.

Let me continue this little trope now with my other point. If going to a liberal arts college is a bit like flyfishing, then life is a bit like a river. Nothing original in that, especially not since Jesus went down to the Jordan or Pooh got swept into one on the Blustery Day or one slipped past The Wind in the Willows or Norman McLean found that A River Runs Through It-or through most of the important things of life. I will claim no originality at all for the imagery and I would commend these other books to you as enormously readable and important liberal arts texts. I would note this, however: if life is a bit like a river, that may mean no more than that we have found both to be risky and dangerous even while providing an adventure we cannot live without and a path to somewhere else.

Having been around a river or two and having explored many reaches of trout streams by myself, and having gotten into trouble more than once, I know that the river that runs through it may also run over you. I learned that one day when I left my truck parked on a gravel bed below a dam and they turned the generators on. I got the truck out but my fishing partner Bob Benson of the English department had a rather long walk before I could get to the other side of the river to pick him up. I had that same long walk one day myself when the river I was wading just seemed to get better and better before I realized I was walking not in true rapids but in rising generator flow that had already cut off my escape route. Some of our Sewanee students learned this when the rising flow tipped their canoe, dumped their gear, destroyed the canoe under a log jam, and nearly cost them their lives. And the same reach that nearly claimed them did claim a life of a local high school student the next year.

Both life and rivers are fraught with risk and they can each bear you away-somewhere else or to your death. But my concern is not with where we go; it is the going, the life on the river as it bears us along-and as it provides a bit of fishing as we go. Unless you are going to sit on the bank, you have to learn the river and you can’t do that without also learning a lot about yourself. That is why we construct liberal arts education as we do.

If life is a river, liberal arts education is a crooked river. One day, Gus (the hero of our story) after a devastating episode on the river when he thought he had hooked the big one (which turned out to be a drowned fisherman floating in his waders), runs away from the river and climbs a nearby mountain. As he scales the peak, much like Petrarch scaling Mt. Ventoux in Italy, he gains a high perspective on the valley below him and then discovers why is home river is called the river “why”-the meanders and twists of the river as it bends down the valley seem to spell out in a kind of river cursive, the word ‘why’.

Liberal arts education is a crooked river. Your parents suspect that to begin with because they don’t know why we don’t let you choose your major until you have been here two years (they want to choose it for you now!). They want a guarantee that if they spend $100,000plus getting you through here that you are going to major in something sensible like economics and get a job. They don’t want to hear that you are taking art, going abroad to India, doing anthropology fieldwork in midwifery in Appalachian coves, and are going to major in religion. Parents don’t want to hear that.

You will suspect liberal arts is a crooked river when you work out your first “tree form” for registration and discover that it does not guarantee you the class you want but only a chance to choose from a list of classes all of which seem to be closed at the moment. And you will know it is a crooked river when at the end of the day, you still have only one class for certain, and classes start tomorrow. Does that happen? Yeah. Do we help you straighten it out. Yeah, we do that too.

You will find it is a crooked river when your roommate is from a small town in Alabama and you are from a small town in New Jersey and you discover you both start to unroll the same poster to put on the wall. And then you discover that you both have cousins who went to the same prep school in Virginia. And you will find as you live here and meet people that Sewanee, like life, is full of twists and turns, of crooks and bends, that not only make the difficulties bearable but which you discover are the essence of the place.

You will find it is a crooked river when you already had your tickets for Colorado for spring break and your professor speaks to you one day after class and says she is going on the outreach program to Jamaica and thinks it would be something you would really enjoy-and you go. Or you decide you have had all the social posturing you can stand, that this time you are really fed up, you just don’t belong here, and you are going to transfer and someone on the staff asks you to help out for an afternoon in a local school-and you love it.

Or you may discover what a crooked river liberal education at Sewanee is in quite another way. This past Monday, I had a chance meeting in the hallway outside my office with a young woman. She was a student here and I knew her many years ago. Today she is working in the strategic environmental planning office at Georgia Tech. Have you seen that big new building going up in downtown Atlanta at North Exit? The new $50M computing technology center Tech is building right beside the interstate? That is the project she is working on. Before that she was in private practice as an architect and before that worked in the planning office of Emory University where she had gone when she left her successful career as a restoration architect with the US Park Service. She had been one of the coordinators of the Park Service project to restore the decaying 19th century fortresses in the Gulf of Mexico beyond Key West. Before that she worked on restoration of ghost towns in the Texas Hill Country while she was in architecture school where she had gone to study toy design which is what she thought she wanted to do when she grew up. But I knew her long before she became an architect. She was my work study student-and a Sewanee religion major.

The crooks in the Sewanee river can be surprising. You know Sewanee has this motto-not Ecce Quam Bonum-but the other one, the one people yell all over the place: “Yea, Sewanee’s Right”. It is part of an old football cheer:

“Rip ‘em up, tear ‘em up
Leave them in the lurch.
Down with the heathen,
Up with the church---yea! Sewanee’s Right!

One of our former English professors was driving through Switzerland once and as he descended a road in the Alps, a car overtook him and passed. He had a put a Sewanee decal in the window. As the car passed, an unknown alum stuck his head out the window and yelled, “Yea, Sewanee’s Right!” The Sewanee world, crooked as it is, turns out to be fairly small. One of our old professors-Prof. Moore (a.k.a. “Boothead) retired after teaching English for forty years. He then began to travel and fulfilled a life long dream to get to Timbuktu-still a very remote place in Africa. After days of difficult travel, he at last realized his dream and got off a grimy bus in an even more grimy town. It has been a long, hot, difficult journey. He went into the lobby restroom in the one European hotel in the town. There, scrawled of the wall of the restroom: “Yea, Sewanee’s Right”.

Dean Puckette, who taught math here for 30 years, was traveling once in Africa and decided to drive into the veld, into the sparse upcountry on the edge of central Africa. After a few hundred miles his car broke down in the middle of, well, central Africa. Not a village in sight, not a hut or house. Nothing but dust and dry grass and a long dirt road reaching to the horizon in either direction. But in the distance, there was a bit of dust on the road and after a long while the car, coming from the opposite direction, pulled up and stopped. Out stepped as Sewanee student who said, “Hi, Dean Puckette. Can I help you?”

Sometimes the crooked river of life at Sewanee takes a turn you can hardly bear: a friend dies and you don’t know what that kind of pain is like until you hang on to your friends weeping in an ER. And you don’t know what that kind of friendship is like until a tragedy strikes your family in Louisiana and when you come into a funeral home, you see your whole fraternity from Sewanee that has flown there to be with you.

Sometimes life is a crooked river. You do something really dumb-like the student here who cheated on a test and was expelled by the Honor Council. He went away, thinking his career at Sewanee and his planned life was pretty much over. But on that crooked river, he came to himself and like Gus looking down on the river “why”, he gained some perspective-and re-applied for admission. That was long ago. He went on to become a college professor-at the University of the South.

These are the turns of life that make it a crooked river. And Sewanee will not straighten those turns out for you. It will not protect you from stupid people (or your own stupidity). It cannot guarantee that you will get every class you want. It cannot straighten the curves of admission so it can guarantee you the graduate school you want. And perhaps more importantly, it cannot straighten the curves of learning so that you can learn without ambiguity and uncertainty. And most important of all, we cannot straighten the curve of truth and give you a single path to follow. If you need those things, if you want a straight and narrow path, Sewanee is probably not for you.

And in this context I would urge you to be wary of any school or any teacher who offers you a river without a bend: we tried that with real rivers around here about three decades ago. It was a Corps of Engineers and TVA project called “channelization” which worked on the very sensible premise that the reason there was flooding was that streams were crooked and stopped the water from flowing fast enough to drain away. Simple solution: straighten out all the streams. So they set into bulldozing the banks of streams, taking out the bends and making them run straight as arrows to the nearest river. It was an environmental disaster and the land has not yet recovered from it. A river that doesn’t bend isn’t a river-it is a form of terrorism.

In liberal arts education the worst kind of channelization, straightening the curves, is in early specialization in pre-professional programs and in the effort to get you to think about your major before you come to Sewanee. I hope you are not running around up here telling us, “Oh, I will be pre-med” or “I plan to major in econ and get my MBA.” HEY! Not knowing what you want to do is part of the curves of the river. That is why you come to a place like Sewanee. Over and over again as an advisor, I have seen people who come here already fixed in their minds on this major, this career only to have the vision changed by any of dozens of happenstances and serendipitious meetings in the curving, meandering river of education here. Worse, I have seen students who have so channelized their minds about a major that they lost the benefit of being able to call their education liberal in any sense.

A couple of weeks ago, one of my first year students wrote this to me:

A few years ago it was okay to say that I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. When I worried about it then, the response of everyone else around me was "you don't have to worry about that yet, you have plenty of time to decided." Well, I don't know if it's just me but suddenly time feels like it's flying by and I don't know what I am doing with it but sometimes I get the sense that I am just wasting it when I don't really have the luxury to do that. Now that I am in my second semester of my freshman year in college, which by the way, I still cannot believe, I've started to realize that I cannot expect the same answer from people when I wonder what I want to do with my life. One, because everyone else around is also thinking the same thing and two because I don't really have to time to decided, I really have to start thinking about the future, and I hate to admit it but this really, really scares me. I think the reason why I haven't really been able to sit down and think about what I want to do is because every time I think about the future I get freaked out and I have to think about something else. The thing that scares me the most is that most normal people at least are inclined one way or another about something they like. They are either into the sciences or they're good at math or history or something of that sort. Well I don't know if I'm just a rare exception but I feel like I have to work just as equally hard at everything I do, meaning I'm not exceptionally good at just one thing, you can just call me average or a well-rounded person, which isn't a bad thing but I wouldn't mind being really good at one thing so I could always count on that one thing that would help me succeed in life. I'm just wondering if one day it will all just come to me and I'll realized what I'm supposed to do, I hope that's exactly how it happens because I can say I'm a kind of a "lost soul" right now and I wouldn't mind some guidances.

It is funny how things begin to converge when you are working on something. She wrote this passage to me just as I was re-reading The River Why. Gus, our angler, comes to a similar place in his life. His personal life is a mess. He doesn’t seem to be good at anything but fishing and not real good at cleaning up his shack. [He has become too fond of the aphorism, “Old fishermen never die; they just smell that way.”] His family, while interesting, is-like many interesting families-dysfunctional [which means it generated more weirdness and unease than it did happiness and contentment]. He still had not found the girl in the tree and the world around him seemed to be the very emblem of disorder and ruin. The river had just offered up to him not a salmon or steelhead but a bloated angler for his trophy. And he is haunted by visions and hallucinations. He is a “kind of lost soul”. He fled to the wilderness and began walking upstream, camping at night alone in the cold. Finally, he ascends a mountain ridge and there near the top, he comes to a small spring that was the source of the River Why. In the chilling waters of the mountain spring he begins to come to an acceptance of himself as an angler, as a person:

“God knows, I wanted to know my soul, I wanted to befriend Whoever it had been that walked with me on the road, yesterday dawn. But when I stuck my feet in the source-spring I could feel too well the limits of my own unguided yearnings: I would never make it. Not alone. I would never make it to the real source of things unless or until Ol’ Nameless chose to come and find me fishing.”

Ol’ Nameless is Gus’ word for God. Not the sappy God of television church and Sunday morning church of people who would rather be fishing, but the real God, the unspeakable, nameless God. The God who makes things obscure rather than clear, who makes us discover him in waste places and cold water and the dark night of the soul. It is the God who finally catches us and does not let us go. Gus turned to Meister Eckhart to describe this:

“God lies in wait for us with nothing so much as love, and love is like a fisherman’s hook: without it he could never catch a fish, but once the hook is taken the fisherman is sure of the fish. Even though the fish twists hither and yon, still the fisherman is sure of him. So, too, I speak of love: he who is caught by it is held by the strongest of bonds, and yet the stress is pleasant; he who takes this sweet burden upon himself gets further, and comes nearer to what he aims at, than he would by means of any harsh ordinance ever devised by man. Moreover, he can sweetly bear all that happens to him; all that God inflicts he can take cheerfully. Nothing makes you God’s own, or God yours, as much as this sweet bond. When one has found this way, he looks for no other. To hang on this hook is to be so completely captured that feet and hands, mouth and eyes, the heart, and all a man is and has become God’s own….Whatever he does, who is caught by this hook, love does it, and love alone…”

The kind of love Eckhart is describing here is erotic love: a powerful, consuming horniness for God, for truth. It is this love that not only binds us to God but is all the root of all knowledge. All knowledge begins in eros, in passion, and if you don't feel it, don't come here; don't go to college. From the passion there arises vision and that is the essence of the liberal arts. Just as the vision on the river sustained Gus, so vision sustains you in the liberal arts. You MUST find a vision if you come here. This is not a check off school, not a place where you can learn by going to class and doing all the work. That won't cut it here. If you don't find something or bring something more--what I am calling here the vision--you will waste your time and do poorly-even if you make A’s.

For Gus, the vision was the naked girl in the tree over the river. At length, as the book and the river why bends its crooked course to the end, he finds her-or more to the point, when he is ready, she finds him. Her name is Eddy-not Eddie for Edward or Edwina-but Eddy as in a turning current in a river. A flow of the river that bends back upon itself and may even flow upstream. If you flyfish or kayak, you will learn about eddys because they hold fish and they may be the only slow water to protect you on a surging river. Gus finds Eddy-the calm, peace, the clear slackwater of current that gives you peace in the midst of all the crooks and bends and falls and cascades and rapids of the journey we call life.

I cannot promise you that if you come to Sewanee, you will find or follow the naked girl flyfishing from a tree. But like Gus you will be a pilgrim and if you follow this bending river, you may find another beautiful maiden--her ancient name is Sophia-wisdom: the mistress, lover, consort of all knowledge, the vision of all seekers. Don’t set your eye down this bending river called Sewanee unless you seek wisdom as well as knowledge, for it is the pursuit of wisdom, that is what this place is about. It is not enough to know, not enough to learn, not enough to study, not enough to be smart, to get your degree, to have a career. Those things you can do on your own and do easily elsewhere. Don’t come here for knowledge. Come here for wisdom, for love, for a passion you cannot deny. But know this, this is not a base love; it is a divine love, and only a few will see God or find Wisdom--and she only naked to those whose hearts are pure and whose only lust is for truth.

She has golden hair and is kicking up her heels in the swing on the oak tree by the Bishop's Common. Let’s go find her.

Gerald L. Smith