It is mainly little places which permit the modesty of pace needed for long thoughts, and the conditions of closeness under which human beings begin to stand out and become distinct in their first and second nature. These places are the veritable harbors of refuge and recovery for civilization.

Today, the same day on which you cease to be transient members of the College {ed., this commencement address was delivered at St. John’s College}, is the day on which you join us as its permanent members. Our polity provides for it to be so, and our common studies confirm the communion. Therefore I would like to speak to you today as members-at-large of the College, who are about to disperse into the world after having achieved a preliminary completion of our program of study. People who have been nourished in this way by a community are called, in Latin, its “alumni;” and I would like to speak to you as alumni. I mean I would like to speak as reasonably educated persons do talk to each other in the world at large, namely not about books but through books—by means of learning, but not, I hope, learnedly. I shall not say “Aristotle says in his Nicomachean Ethics” or “Jefferson says in the Declaration of Independence,” but I shall rather, in a small and backsliding way, directly imitate Jefferson, who in writing the Declaration drew on shelves of theory and yet, as he reports, “turned to neither book nor pamphlet while writing it.” And this distinction between thinking more through books than about them is the maximum concession I can make to the otherwise obtuse separation of  “life” and “study.” …

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