EMPTY NICHES. One day–I think it was during the year I spent in New Haven after graduation–a Catholic friend and I were walking through campus when he pointed to one of the many pseudo-Gothic buildings. “Look there,” he said; I looked there and came up blank. What was to see that I hadn’t seen a thousand times before?

“Look at the niches.”

Oh. As soon as he said that, I realized what those strange recesses were–the large, lozenge-shaped nooks, with crownlike roofs, that had been carved into the building’s walls at its corners and high points. They were familiar because I saw them every Sunday at church–except there, they had statues in them. Yale’s were empty. Add Chesterton’s essay “The Architect of Spears,” stir, and you have the recipe for great intellectual restlessness, the dissatisfaction that prompts philosophy. What’s supposed to go in those niches? What should I honor? What should Yale honor? Where do my projects, questions, and desires hook onto this educational institution and its confused, tarnished sense of itself? That is just the beginning of the quest.