Anthem

I got to talking with Gnomus the other night. We had a brief but poignant chat about what we really missed about the old place. We missed the students, the culture, the ideals most of all; the politics and the shady deals, the vulgar and somewhat tawdry attitudes not at all. The buildings were just buildings, of course. We missed the noodles. And of all things, we missed singing the Anthem, that uplifting paean to a vanished age, almost every Monday morning.

Yet, that age of mankind is not yet completely vanished, not yet vanquished or dishonoured. We still have heroes from foreign shores, we still have many sons and daughters from all the world's wide lands. We still stand together for the cause, with the hearts, the hopes, and the aims still one. It is a fellowship not to be broken, even if you have outside influences baring their malign fangs and inside influences like viruses trying to infiltrate a cell and spawn copies of themselves.

We will always remember the words of Robert Browning in Rabbi Ben Ezra:

Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be —
The last of life, for which the first was made.
Our lives are in His hand,
Who saith, "A whole I planned —
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid."

The years have passed: some have been kind, some less kind, some rather cruel. But there is still a fellowship. We might not all believe in the same God, or a God at all. But deep inside, there is the sense that there is more to come, that the best is yet to be, that there is a higher purpose or a higher calling — and even if there weren't, it would be our duty or our destiny to make it so.