I remember last May, as my first year of college was ending, I
came back from an evening of studying to find my room completely
disheveled. My roommate had removed the carpeting that had covered
the tile floor of the room all year and in the process disrupted
everything that had rested on top of it.

Sounds unimportant in the whole freshman-year experience, but
this act had an utterly jarring effect on me. The desks and beds
still lay askew. The empty dresser drawers still gaped in shock.
The floor was cold, and I didn’t want to take my shoes off.

Our couch was gone as well, so I had just my bed to sit on. So I
sat on the bed, too confused to study any more, and listened to
“Flamenco Sketches”–the last track on Kind of Blue and possibly
the most beautiful piece of music about late-night restlessness–on
a loop, staring out of my window on the eighth floor of Reinert
Hall, trying to figure out what was happening.

I was looking on a community that seemed, to me, to be
disintegrating. I was realizing this wasn’t high school: when you
graduate from Saint Louis University, you’re not obliged to return
to St. Louis ever again. The friendships of life, I was coming to
understand, flourish with proximity and are best left untouched
until we are able to revitalize them.

But where do we all meet again? There’s more to life in cities
than the spaces we invest in for a moment, only to leave behind
when we have earned our money or our degrees–or even our
friendships.

I hadn’t really figured it out until now, but there is something
more: There’s the land. And in St. Louis, the land means the
river.

Traveling from Harlem to Mexico City in 1920, just after
graduating form high school, Langston Hughes passed by St. Louis on
a train and wrote these words: “I’ve known rivers ancient as the
world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.”

Cities are so young a thing compared to rivers. Two hundred
years ago St. Louis was a settlement running a couple dozen blocks
from north to south and about half that east to west.

One hundred years ago the city stopped at Kingshighway, and
Forest Park was still a kind of wilderness with burial mounds from
the indigenous peoples interspersed throughout. University City
practically didn’t exist.

Another poet, walking along the shores of the Thames and
thinking of desolation, wrote, “The wind/Crosses the brown land,
unheard. The nymphs are departed.”

In his Waste Land, T.S. Eliot describes a society not destroyed,
but dispersed, where individuals are separated from both each other
and the sublime experiences of life. Each is left to assign to the
world his or her own significance, all the while wishing for a new
cohesion.

The nymphs, the shared magic of the lives that now draw to a
close here at SLU, will leave, but we shall find them again if we
listen to the voices carried on the wind.

A few weeks ago, I listened and took a little pilgrimage to the
Mississippi. Walking there, down Laclede Avenue, then Market, I was
almost scared at one point that when I arrived the river would not
be there. Passing through the city in the middle of the night, the
river seemed a myth, despite how young I knew the buildings
were.

Like Eliot’s speaker, I felt as though the land had felt itself
unloved and abandoned us. But it was there–dirty as hell and
bathed in neon from the gambling boats, but flowing right before me
all the same.

The land endures like that, I’ve learned.

I sat for a while on the cobblestones, just inches from the
quiet muddy water washing up the bricks. Then a voice from the
overlook above caught my attention: someone asked me to join
him.

I walked up the embankment and found a man about my age and his
friend, a boyish-looking blonde.

The two were traveling from Minneapolis to New Orleans telling
folks about Jesus, and they had stopped to see the river. They
asked me about God, and I told them. Then the boyish one put his
hands out and prayed over me, after which I shook their hands and
began to walk home.

It seems the river works as well as ever–they don’t make ’em
like they used to. Special things still happen on its banks.
Particular people gather there in the early morning looking to
transcend out youthful, trashy urban life.

Perhaps that’s the restlessness in “Flamenco Sketches,” the
incompletion in the city streets at night, the world we love but
all the same sometimes find unfulfilling in the slowness before
sleep–before we forget the pang of disconnect and wake up the next
day prepared to work, ready to pack up and move on.

But we must leave, and we know that none of us will come back to
the same place–even if we return to this campus. We shall all be
different. We shall people our world in a new, exciting way. But we
must not forget the rivers and the lands that tie our lives into
one narrative.

If you listen carefully you’ll hear the laughter of the nymphs
that always leave before we really get to know them. Shall we
follow where they take us? Shall we remember this life to the new?
Shall we gather at the river?

Andrew Ivers is a sophomore studying English and political
science.