Bryce Taylor, a junior at Silliman College and my son Gabriel’s roommate, writes an occasional column titled *Untimely Meditations* for the Yale Daily News. Hat tip to Matt Gerken. What does Gabe know?

Black metal spears, their tips pointed skyward, line Grove Street in legions. They form a fence, and behind them are graves. One might wonder, trudging along the sidewalk, what invisible army it is that holds these spears. One might feel grateful that they protect us from the dead.

On occasion, though, it is well to seek out the dead, to convene with their humble silence. More perspective, as it is called, can perhaps be gleaned from an hour in the cemetery than from a whole semester abroad. England and China have their charms, but in a cemetery you are looking at your certain destiny. Dust.

I approached the gate and found it closed. There was a bench nearby. I took a seat and looked past the sable spears to clusters of tombstones, some standing proudly erect, others leaning as if to bow. The bodies beneath them lay starkly parallel amid the dirt of the earth. “The scepter, learning, physic, must/ All follow this, and come to dust.” Shakespeare. A leaf dropped to the ground. Fall was encroaching… .

Students with their books and backpacks paced along the sidewalk. Why — if learning comes to dust — do they work so hard to learn? What are we doing here? “Gathering rosebuds while we may,” one might propose. But if rosebuds, too, amount to dust, they are rubbish, they are empty. Something there is that wants immortality.

How bizarre a cemetery is! How strange that men should bury one another, should entertain superstitions about ghouls and souls and afterlives. What is it in men that induces them to dream of infinity? What is it that prompts Hamlet to fear the next life? How is it that feeble-bodied brutes evolved from apes should have in common — whatever their culture, whatever their historical period — some sense of that dimension transcending their momentary dust-bound lives.

I rose from my seat. Along the sidewalk, I passed beneath the shadow of the entrance gate. It towers high above the ranks of black spears. On another day I will enter the gate. For now I study its proclamation. THE DEAD SHALL BE RAISED. What absurdity! What a scandal, what an embarrassment to our enlightened campus!

I marched along the sidewalk, happy to think that the worm, very soon, will thrust its head out of the dirt and into the sunlight.