A little unassuming mural of Dartmouth.

The sun is setting on one of the first spring days—it’s playing tricks in the clear air and our little college seems without blemish. The library tower, Old Dartmouth Hall, the red chapel steeple and the central buildings of administration blaze their image on the pure blue sky. Even the pools of mud on the lawn glisten with some foreign grace. Planted underneath lie the seeds of so many thoughts- meditations on semi-truths and anxieties produced by the wonder of things we have never fully known. It is finals time, a breath, the eye of the storm.

The clouds above this place greet us freshly and give the impression that they are tied to the setting, echoing elevated granite reliefs on brick buildings. Lift us all higher, we supplicate in silence, let us all throw back the rays of distant truths; facades glimmer with unassailable, crystalline veracity. Beauty and honor we wish we could claim for ourselves is only in a title associating us with this place, now adorned in dusky radiance.

Peradventure this setting sun will someday come to alight on us and we can reflect its grace on our own company. But even then we’ll just be a figure, a quiet afternoon in the midst of the storm. Recall, in striving, that they erected these edifices only to surface a semblance of society in this wild land. Our imitation is as fresh as the reflections on these puddles, as original as today's sunset.

O Dartmouth, tame the savages we know ourselves to be and give us the hope that this sun will rise again.

Spring, 2006