Good Morning, and welcome to this one-day conference, entitled “What Does the River Want To Be?” sponsored by The Dallas Institute’s Center for the City under the Directorship of Dr. Gail Thomas. Welcome alike to our City Leaders in attendance this morning, to our guests, and to each individual citizen of Dallas.

Actually, this first event of our new year marks the beginning of The Dallas Institute’s third decade and is representative of the presence in Dallas of the Institute as Dr. Thomas, Dr. Joanne Stroud, and others envisioned it back in 1981. The Institute exists for the sake of the city, which is the trademark of Western civilization, and in spite of the massive wars of the 20^th century, and the globalizing, trans-national movements of the 21^st, the city will continue to stand as the distinctive signature of the West.

The city as we know it is both the dwelling place and the creative matrix of culture; the democratic city is only place where the entire world can come together in a community of interest, where the present moment can be lived most vitally and the future is envisioned in its plenitude. The Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans, our ancient forebears whom we should continue to regard with all seriousness, teach us in their epic tales that cities have destinies. Some cities, it seems, are destined for greatness, some not. But those old stories also tell us that every city holds its fate in its own hands as time passes. Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome achieved the full measure of their greatness and, though perhaps dimmed now of their former grandeur, live forever in our imaginations for their achievements, for their stature as cities. Other ancient cities, however, such as Babylon, Thebes, and Troy, were not so wise in their choices and entered upon a kind of cursed history, always showing potential for greatness, always falling short, always frustrating both heroes and the gods. It seems a mystery: such cities, we are told in the ancient narratives, somehow, at some point, made the wrong choices and thus irreversibly wandered away from the path that would have led toward their true greatness.

If cities are the highest consequence of civilization’s advance, and if, behind that advance, within the protected, creative space of the city, culture is conceived and developed, then one of the most crucial aspects of a city’s founding and growth lies in its encounter with nature. In the fundamental duality of nature and culture, it is clear that nature has priority. Culture is by comparison always recent, emerging into history in the wake of our constant efforts to push back the last frontier, reshape the margins—culture is the prime social endeavor of humankind. As civilization advances, then, and culture develops, there is a continual interaction, an interface, between nature and culture, and since nature is always already there when we latecomers arrive, it is culture that has to make choices about how its interaction with nature will proceed. What will the city do with its hills and valleys, its native vegetation, its seashores and water courses?

And what determines the choices a city will make? Is it a matter of attitude, an assumption of power or of piety, that dictates those choices? According to Virgil’s great epic The Aeneid, the powerful Trojan hero Aeneas is directed by the god of the Tiber River in his quest to found Rome. Centuries later, Goethe’s Faust devoutly wishes to aid humanity by conquering nature, and among his first choices is to control a great river by direct, naked force. And if we remember that Faust’s power is the result of a bargain with the Devil, we are not surprised that his attempt to control the environment has dark, unforeseen consequences. These are extremes, but can we afford to believe any more in the exercise of brute power, like Faust’s, than we might count on hearing a clear, divine voice from the river itself, as Aeneas did? What course is left to us? The premise of this conference today is that the imagination is the faculty through which we might come to the best understanding of one of our prime natural resources, the Trinity. The question of the conference, “What Does the River Want To Be?”, is a question for the imagination.

There is no doubt that the choices we make about our natural resources are still, even in an age of globalization, vastly important in terms of their consequences, and among those resources, water is arguably the most important. At the beginning of Moby-Dick, Herman Melville writes a long lyrical passage about the connection between water and cities, toward the end of which he ponders why it is that mankind is so drawn to such an ambiguous element—both giver and taker of life. What about the myth of Narcissus, Melville asks, the story of the boy so transfixed by his own image that he fell into the water in pursuit of it? Narcissus, Melville writes, became obsessed with the “tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain,” unable at last to see himself in relation to the water that gave back to him an image of himself. The failure, Melville concludes, is a failure of vision, an inability to see beyond the self; and it is Narcissus’ failure, not nature’s: “that same image,” he writes, “we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.”

That “ungraspable,” elusive aspect of nature—its inner life—is what we agents of culture face in our decisions about the Trinity. Is the river, and all of nature, simply to be considered what Martin Heidegger called “standing reserve”—“for use” according to human need? Or is Melville, like the old Greek storytellers, right in maintaining that nature has a life, too, a spirit that we can discover by imagining it—and that what we find out about it through imagination must necessarily influence our decisions about its use?

Dallas has already achieved a large measure of its full greatness, is already on its way to that plenitude. But now we are at another moment of choice that will perhaps decisively affect what we will become in the future—and for all time. That is why we believe it is imperative to ask, as we will today, “What Does the River Want To Be?”