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.

BRIGHT star! would I were steadfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature’s patient sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

I know that my Redeemer liveth,
and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth;
and though this body be destroyed, yet shall I see God;
whom I shall see for myself and mine eyes shall behold,
and not as a stranger.

Four out of five books I read these days are books I’ve read before. I’m currently rereading A Prayer for Owen Meany, a novel cut to the measure of the Samuel Johnson maxim just posted and a story as involving on the fourth read as it was on the first some twenty years ago.

Why so much rereading, and all of it satisfying? For reasons having to do with the lyric power of that line from the epic of Job, that opening anthem of the Burial Office of the Book of Common Prayer. To read again words that fortify, words to live with is, as the poet L. E. Sissman said, to “return not as a pilgrim but as a familiar, almost a friend.” To put the same thing in a lapidary way and without being the least bit lugubrious about it, I reread books for the same reason I keep coming back to church; because I know I’m going to die. Sissman continues:

A list of books that you reread is like a clearing in the forest: a level, clean, well-lighted place where you set down your burdens and set up your home, your identity, your concerns, your continuity in a world that is at best indifferent, at worst malign. Since you, the reader, are that hero of modern literature, the existential loner, the smallest denominator of moral force, it behooves you to take counsel, sustenance, and solace from the writers who have been writing about you these hundred or five hundred years, to sequester yourself with their books and read and reread them to get a fix on yourself and a purchase on the world that will, with luck, like the house in the clearing, last you for life.

Eamon Duffy writes:

Prayer for the dead is neither fear nor fire insurance, emphatically not an attempt to appease an angry or sadistic God. It is an exercise in the virtues of faith and hope and love.

For prayer for the dead is also a bridge across the gulf of separation which is death. We are social beings, but most of us can expect to die alone, in a hospital bed rather than in our homes. Death is the ultimate alienation, the sacramental expression of all the barriers which divide us. Medieval Christianity witnessed against that isolation by constantly remembering the dead, recalling their names, in the liturgy and in private: the dead remained part of the church community . The Reformation, in silencing all naming of the dead in prayer, unwittingly endorsed the experience of death as alienation.

Images of purgatory come and go, some better than others, none of them essential. We do not pray for the dead to bail them out of prison or to placate a God who demands satisfaction, but because we know that they live in Christ, bound to us in a single faith and hope and love, and therefore with a right to a place in our prayers. We feel ourselves diminished by their deaths, and that has a reality in faith as well as in natural experience.

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Duffy in The Tablet. Author of the terrific book The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400 to c. 1580, Duffy is Professor of the History of Christianity, and Fellow and Director of Studies, Magdalene College, The University of Cambridge.