Book of Names, left: LIST OF CAROLINA ALUMNI LOST IN MILITARY SERVICE
Book of Names, right: The Soldier Walks Under the Trees of the University / The walls have been shaded for so many years / By the green magnificence of these great lives / Their bricks are darkened till the end of time / Small touching whites in the perpetual / Darkness that saturates the unwalled world; / Saved from the sky by leaves, and from the earth by stone /
The pupils trust like flowers to the shades / And interminable twilight of these latitudes.
/ In our zone innocence is born in banks / And cultured in colonies the rich have sown: /
The one is spared here what the many share /
To write the histories that others are. / The oak escapes the storm that broke the reeds, /
They read here; they read, too, of reeds, /
Of storms; and are, almost sublime /
In their read ignorance of everything. / The poor are always--somewhere, but not here; /
We learn of them where they and Guilt subsist /
with Death and Evil: in books, in books, in books. /
Ah, sweet to contemplate the causes, not the things! /
The soul learns fortitude in libraries, /
Enduring patience in another's pain, /
And pity for the lives we do not change: /
All that the world would be, if it were real. /
When will the boughs break blazing from these trees, /
The darkened walls float heavenward like soot? /
The days when man say: "Where we look is fire-- /
The iron branches flower in my veins"? /
In that night even to be rich is difficult, /
The world is something even books believe, /
The bombs fall all year long among the states, /
And the blood is black upon the unturned leaves. /
--Randall Jarrett
Book of Names, pedestal: The fading footsteps lost forever /
The eloquent lips, the passionate hearts /
All be as if they'd never been? /
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . /
Now all our walking is the paths they trod, /
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . /
So thus the dead do live in us again, /
And we the living honorably may die. / --Paul Green
Bench, facing Book of Names: He heard ... the mellow booming of the campus bell. And suddenly it seemed to him that all the beaten walks were thudding with the footfalls of lost boys, himself among them, running for their class. Then, as he listened, the far bell died away, and the phantom runners thudded into oblivion / --Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel
Plaque on left of bench: GIVEN BY THE CAROLINA ROTC ALUMNI
11 July 2014 | Commemorative Landscapes of North Carolina