Walmart cannot-at its scale of distribution-overcome the inherent dysfunctionality of its inventory maintenance and distribution mechanisms: Walmart stores will always be out of something, even while Walmart has plenty of that something in a warehouse somewhere. Systems always fail, and, in the end, every system requires more energy to keep it running or to fix its failures than the system or those failures are worth. Component parts fall apart and resolve into randomly arrayed lowest common denominators. First, we need to understand that every physical system of the world and every derivative or overlaid social/cultural system is tainted at its core by entropy. As I am beginning to see it, our task is not so much to change the world as it is to understand it: to understand some very fundamental aspects of the world that invalidate the agendas of change that are so dear to us. “Those damn rocks” changed my view of what I think we should be about. Increasingly, however, and of late I have been thinking about all this in a different way. That is fine and I am not trying to make you doubt your best instincts or be unfaithful to your dreams.
And some of you will do these things and do them well. It has been the now clichéd punditry of innumerable professors (including myself), deans, college presidents, and especially commencement speakers to tell you some version of “We expect you to change the world.” We sort you out for admission and then educate you to be agents of change-to use your education to solve problems, to make the world better, to be the vanguard of an army of informed warriors against poverty, ignorance, disease, sickness-and against corruption, bureaucracy, and corporate privilege. I have made peace with the disorder, the entropy, of the world. I have made a similar peace with potholes in roads, with Facebook’s recommending dead people to me for friends, with the perpetually understocked inventories in Walmart, with the now hundreds of misshelved books in duPont, with the Sirius system that can never get my account right. “We love the things we love for what they are.” After describing the seasons of this tiny stream, which Frost admits is not much of a stream, he confesses, “We love the things we love for what they are.” I return in my mind to this poem, this line, often: “We love the things we love for what they are.” Not for what they will be when we have hammered them into shape, not for what they will be when we finish renovating, not for what they will be when the new design study is complete and we have the funding for a total makeover of our buildings and lands. As I sat with Amber, I recalled Robert Frost’s poem “Hyla Brook”-a beautiful poem about a tiny and insignificant rivulet of a stream that bordered his New Hampshire farm. I decided not to fight that battle anymore and that I would see those stones all over campus as tokens of a deeper truth about Sewanee, about the world-and about my relation to it. And in that moment in the sun on Stirling’s porch, I made my peace. Amber said back to me, “What are you talking about?” I told her that I had finally made my peace with these sandstone borders I have been trying to get removed for two decades. The only other places I am familiar with that use sandstone this way are the access roads of stripmines. Tennessee trash landscaping at its finest/worst. O ne day last year, I was sitting on the porch at Stirling’s with daughter Amber and said to her, “I love those damn rocks.” I was referring to the crude stone borders-the large chunks of sandstone-that we have used to line our roads, curbs, and walkways.
Eloquent words for a front porch full#
The full text of Jerry Smith’s final lecture, delivered to a standing-room-only audience on April 27, 2016, at McGriff Alumni House: A Few Parting Words from Smith In the final lecture of his distinguished teaching career, longtime Professor of Religion Jerry Smith waxed eloquent on competence, compassion, and “those damn rocks.”
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