In His Own Words

Campus, Community, Arches

In Ron Thomas’s farewell message to alumni in Arches, Spring 2016, he returned again to the subject of home. Here is an excerpt.

One thing is clear as I meet and talk with you in your hometowns: Wherever you are now, when you think of home, so many of you still think of Puget Sound. Me, too.

At every August Convocation (as first-year students and families gather to start their Puget Sound careers) and at every May Commencement (when they gather again, as seniors, to complete them) I speak of that quest for home. I cite Homer and Tennyson, T.S. Eliot and Charles Dickens, Frost and Twain, Martin Luther King and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Eleanor Roosevelt and Toni Morrison. But I imagine I always also have Springsteen's “Hungry Heart” and “Promised Land” humming in my head, too. The point of all those references to home in all those voices: to try to learn something at these threshold moments of our lives about leaving one home for another, about the universality of the idea of home being not so much a destination as an aspiration, a dream, a quest, a goal. It’s a promise that’s always out there.

So it seems right that in the academy we should call the end of all our labors a “commencement,” a beginning. And it, too, is a sacred ritual—like a Springsteen concert. In our end is our beginning, the starting point for all that comes next. The continuation and renewal of the quest for home, and the eternal refreshment of the hunger in the heart that moves us forward, presses us onward, lifts our eyes to the heights, calls us home, and offers a place to seek a newer world.

President Ron Thomas looks out at Tacoma and Mount Rainier.

Prolific and insightful writer, inspiring educator, and visionary college president Ronald R. Thomas, 74, passed away on April 17, 2023.

Now, as I approach my final Commencement, my last new start at Puget Sound, I am reminded of the advice I have dispensed through 13 years at convocations and commencements, coming and goings, beginnings and ends. Like a senior about to graduate, I have a heart that is hungry still. “Always roaming with a hungry heart,” as Tennyson said of Ulysses.

I think of the longing in those paintings of van Gogh’s bedroom and the dreams he dreamt of the home it might become and, finally, might have been. I think of every Springsteen concert I’ve ever attended, all his heartfelt affirmations of the promised land to which we are all drawn. Of Chicago, and how I hated to leave it in 1990. Of the paradise within Hartford, happier far, named Mary, who awaited me there. Of the City of Destiny that would draw us and raise our eyes to the heights in 2003 and offer us a new beginning. I think of all of you, every one, and of your families. I see you before me gathered in a vast stadium, starting out again, with me, as the sun, off to the west, is shining in my eyes and bathing you all in a golden glow. Forever young.

“We shall not cease from exploration,” Eliot said, “and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” That’s the ultimate homecoming, I guess. It reminds us to leave the place we thought was home, and the family and friends who make it the familiar place of rest we desire above all. And to set out to find the next one. That’s the moment when we really know “the place” for the first time. “Be always coming home,” as Ursula Le Guin put it.

The road is dark, thunder road. And it forms a thin, thin line that stretches out beyond the horizon. But those two lanes—well, they can take us anywhere. Thanks for riding that road with me for awhile and for letting me ride along with you. It’s been like coming home. Really.

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