Surrounded.

From Michael Oakeshott's essay, "The Idea of a University" ...

The characteristic gift of the university is the gift of an interval. Here is an opportunity to put aside the hot allegiances of youth without the necessity of at once acquiring new loyalties to take their place. Here is a break in the tyrannical course of irreparable events; a period in which to look round upon the world and upon oneself without the sense of an enemy at one’s back or the insistent pressure to make up one’s mind; a moment in which to taste the mystery without the necessity of at once seeking a solution. And all this, not in an intellectual vacuum, but surrounded by all the inherited learning and literature and experience of our civilization; not as a sole occupation, but combined with the discipline of studying a recognized branch of learning; and neither as a first step in education nor as a final education to fit a man for the day of judgment, but as a middle. This interval is nothing so commonplace as a pause to get one’s breath; no young man or woman, I take it, would say “Thank you” for an opportunity of that sort; it is not the cessation of activity, but the occasion of a unique kind of activity.

One might, hazarding a misunderstanding, reduce this to a doctrine about the character of a university; one might call it the doctrine of the interim. But the doctrine would be no more than a brief expression of what it felt like to be an undergraduate on that first October morning. Almost overnight, a world of ungracious fact had melted into infinite possibility; we who belonged to no “leisured class” had been freed for a moment from the curse of Adam, the burdensome distinction between work and play. What opened before us was not a road but a boundless sea; it was enough to stretch one’s sails to the wind. The distracting urgency of an immediate destination was absent, duty no longer oppressed, boredom and disappointment were words without meaning; death was unthinkable. But it belongs to the character of an interim to come to an end; there is a time for everything and nothing should be prolonged beyond its time. There eternal undergraduate is a lost soul.

And what of the harvest? Nobody could go down from such a university unmarked. Intellectually, he may be supposed to have acquired some knowledge, and, more important, a certain discipline of mind, a grasp of consequences, a greater command over his own powers. He will know, perhaps, that it is not good enough to have a “point of view,” that what we need is thoughts. He will not go down in possession of an armoury of arguments to prove the truth of what he believes; but he will have acquired something that puts him beyond the reach of the intellectual hooligan, and whatever has been the subject of his study he may be expected to be able to look for some meaning in the things that have greatly moved mankind. Perhaps he may even have found a centre for his intellectual affections. In short, this period at a university may not have equipped him very effectively to earn a living, but he will have learned something to help him lead a more significant life.

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