Emerson said that the "scholar is man thinking." Had Southerners of that era taken seriously the famous lecture entitled "The Amer...ican Scholar," they might have replied by saying that the gentleman is man talking. The accomplished Christian gentleman of the old South was the shadow, attenuated by evangelical Calvinism, of his Renaissance spiritual ancestor, who had been the creation of the rhetorical tradition, out of Aristotle through Cicero distilled finally by Castiglione. By contrast, the New England sage, embodied in Ralph Waldo Emerson, took seriously what has come to be known since the Industrial Revolution as the life of the mind: an activity a little apart from life, and perhaps leading to the fashionable alienation of the "intellectual" of our time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But you forget, or did you ever know, His heritage of cabbage and pigtails,... Old intimacy with alleys, garbage pails, Down in the deep (but always beautiful) South....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have for years been intrigued with the ways in which Jews and southerners are alike--stepchildren of an anguished history. From ...the period before the Civil War, southerners have used Old Testament analogies to portray themselves as "the chosen people," surrounded and outnumbered but destined to survive and triumph against overwhelming odds. This analogy has endured deep in the southern psyche, influencing subconsciously its reactions to events. For example, in 1967, during the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War, polls showed that the South was caught up in military fervor and admiration for the lightning victory of the Israelis. It was almost as if Moshe Dayan had become the Israeli Stonewall Jackson, outthinking and outfighting his Arab foes, just as the boys in gray had done in the Shenandoah Valley against vastly superior numbers in the 1860s.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What the South most needs is "peace," and peace depends upon the supremacy of the law. There can be no enduring peace if the const...itutional rights of any portion of the people are habitually disregarded.... All parts of the Constitution are sacred and must be sacredly observed--the parts that are new no less than the parts that are old. The moral and national prosperity of the Southern States can be most effectively advanced by a hearty and generous recognition of the rights of all, by all--a recognition without reserve or exception. With such a recognition fully accorded it will be practicable to promote, by the influence of all the legitimate agencies of the General Government, the efforts of the people of those States to obtain for themselves the blessings of honest and capable local government.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When you go apartment-hunting in the South, you encounter little old ladies who ask you if you use strong drink. In New York you e...ncounter paranoids who wonder if you will commit suicide--not that they care; what they worry about is blood on their fresh paint, a dubious smell in the hallway, or a hole in the awning as you pass through on your way to the sidewalk. The Southerner who moves to any part of the country has problems, but the culture shock that attacks the Southerner who moves North is almost indescribable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The frontiers are not east or west, north or south; but wherever a man fronts a fact, though that fact be a neighbor, there is an ...unsettled wilderness between him and Canada, between him and the setting sun, or, farther still, between him and it. Let him build himself a log house with the bark on where he is, fronting IT, and wage there an Old French war for seven or seventy years, with Indians and Rangers, or whatever else may come between him and the reality, and save his scalp if he can.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The nearest beach to us on the other side, whither we looked, due east, was on the coast of Galicia, in Spain, whose capital is Sa...ntiago, though by old poets' reckoning it should have been Atlantis or the Hesperides; but heaven is found to be farther west now.... A little south of east was Palos, where Columbus weighed anchor, and farther yet the pillars which Hercules set up; concerning which when we inquired at the top of our voices what was written on them,--for we had the morning sun in our faces, and could not see distinctly,--the inhabitants shouted Ne plus ultra (no more beyond), but the wind bore to us the truth only, plus ultra (more beyond), and over the Bay westward was echoed ultra (beyond). We spoke to them through the surf about the Far West, the true Hesperia, heos peras or end of the day, the This Side Sundown, where the sun was extinguished in the Pacific, and we advised them to pull up stakes and plant those pillars of theirs on the shore of California, whither all our folks were gone,--the only ne plus ultra now. Whereat they looked crestfallen on their cliffs, for we had taken the wind out of all their sails.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is a mistake to suppose that, in a country where the usual evidences of civilization exist, the condition of a very large body ...of inhabitants may not be as degraded as that of savages. I refer to the degraded poor, not now to the degraded rich. To know this I should not need to look farther than to the shanties which everywhere border our railroads, that last improvement in civilization; where I see in my daily walks human beings living in sties, and all winter with an open door, for the sake of light, without any visible, often imaginable, wood-pile, and the forms of both old and young are permanently contracted by the long habit of shrinking from cold and misery, and the development of all their limbs and faculties is checked.... Such too, to a greater or less extent, is the condition of the operatives of every denomination in England, which is the great workhouse of the world. Or I could refer you to Ireland, which is marked as one of the white or enlightened spots on the map. Contrast the physical condition of the Irish with that of the North American Indian, or the South Sea Islander, or any other savage race before it was degraded by contact with the civilized man. Yet I have no doubt that that people's rulers are as wise as the average of civilized rulers. Their condition only proves what squalidness may consist with civilization.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I dug my cellar in the side of a hill sloping to the south, where a woodchuck had formerly dug his burrow, down through sumach and... blackberry roots, and the lowest stain of vegetation, six feet square by seven deep, to a fine sand where potatoes would not freeze in any winter.... I took particular pleasure in this breaking of ground, for in almost all latitudes men dig into the earth for an equable temperature. Under the most splendid house in the city is still to be found the cellar where they store their roots as of old, and long after the superstructure has disappeared posterity remark its dent in the earth. The house is still but a sort of porch at the entrance of a burrow.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »