Lately ... Americans have begun to understand that trouble does not start somewhere on the other side of town. It seems to origina...te inside the absolute middle of the homemade cherry pie. In our history, the state has failed to respond to the weak.... You could be white, male, Presbyterian and heterosexual besides, but if you get fired or if you get sick tomorrow, you might as well be Black, for all the state will want to hear from you.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What side of American life is not touched by this antithesis? What explanation of American life is more central or more illuminati...ng? In everything one finds this frank acceptance of twin values which are not expected to have anything in common: on the one hand, a quite unclouded, quite unhypothetical assumption of aesthetic theory ("high ideals"), on the other a simultaneous acceptance of catchpenny realities. Between university ethics and business ethics, between American culture and American humour, between Good Government and Tammany, between academic pedantry and pavement slang, there is no community, no genial middle ground. The very accent of the words "Highbrow" and "Lowbrow" implies an instinctive perception that this is a very unsatisfactory state of affairs. For both are used in a derogatory sense. The "Highbrow" is the superior person whose virtue is admitted but felt to be an inept unpalatable virtue; while the "Lowbrow" is a good fellow one readily takes to, but with a certain scorn for him and all his works.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Side by side with the Marxists of the northern cities, flourishing in the same situation and starting from the same premise, there... appeared at the beginning of the thirties the second of the anti-capitalist movements of the decade, the movement called Southern Agrarianism. If the Marxists wished to give power to the masses, the Agrarians meant to give it to an educated aristocracy ruling over an eighteenth-century economy. Where the Marxists foresaw an ever-growing concentration of industrial activity in units that were to increase in size, the Agrarians strove to break up the large productive units into groups of small ones, and, through decentralization, return to the society of Jefferson's time, when the great bulk of the people owned their own land. The Agrarians, consequently, looked as strenuously at the past as the Marxists did to the future. Where the Marxists drew their inspiration from the socialist thinkers of the nineteenth century, the Agrarians went back to Plato and his philosopher-kings vigorously trained to rule the state, to Carlyle and superman formulators of modern times, to Chesterton and Belloc and their strong religious orthodoxy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Who decides what is margin and what is text? Who decides where the borders of the homeland run? Absences and silences are potent. ...It is the eloquent margins which frame the official history of the land. As for geography, there are divisions and boundary lines that fissure any state more deeply than the moat it digs around the nationhood. In every country there are gaping holes. People fall through them and disappear. Yet on every side there are also doors to a wider place, a covert geography under sleep where all the waters meet.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, The proper study of mankind is Man.... Placed on this isthmus of a middle state, A being darkly wise and rudely great: With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side, With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride, He hangs between; in doubt to act or rest, In doubt to deem himself a God or Beast, In doubt his mind or body to prefer; Born but to die, and reasoning but to err; Alike in ignorance, his reason such Whether he thinks too little or too much: Chaos of thought and passion, all confused; Still by himself abused, or disabused; Created half to rise and half to fall; Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all; Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled; The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So we took leave of Cape Cod and its inhabitants. We liked the manners of the last, what little we saw of them, very much. They we...re particularly downright and good-humored. The old people appeared remarkably well preserved, as if by the saltness of the atmosphere, and after having once mistaken, we could never be certain whether we were talking to a coeval of our grandparents, or to one of our own age. They are said to be more purely the descendants of the Pilgrims than the inhabitants of any other part of the State. We were told that "sometimes, when the court comes together at Barnstable, they have not a single criminal to try, and the jail is shut up." It was "to let" when we were there. Until quite recently there was no regular lawyer below Orleans. Who, then, will complain of a few regular man-eating sharks along the Back Side?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They plainly did not know how to treat me, but behaved like persons who are underbred. In every threat and in every compliment the...re was a blunder; for they thought that my chief desire was to stand the other side of that stone wall. I could not but smile to see how industriously they locked the door on my meditations, which followed them out again without let or hindrance, and they were really all that was dangerous. As they could not reach me, they had resolved to punish my body; just as boys, if they cannot come at some person against whom they have a spite, will abuse his dog. I saw that the State was half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost all remaining respect for it, and pitied it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The last public hanging in the State took place in 1835 on Prince Hill.... On the fatal day, the victim, a man named Watkins, peer...ing through the iron bars of his cell, and seeing the townfolk scurrying to the place of execution, is said to have remarked, 'Why is everyone running? Nothing can happen until I get there.'LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As a particularly dramatic gesture, he throws wide his arms and whacks the side of the barn with the heavy cane he uses to stab at... contesting bidders. With more vehemence than grammatical elegance, he calls upon the great god Caveat Emptor to witness with what niggardly stinginess these flinty sons of Scotland make cautious offers for what is beyond any question the finest animal ever beheld.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The man who would change the name of Arkansas is the original, iron-jawed, brass-mouthed, copper-bellied corpse-maker from the wil...ds of the Ozarks! He is the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, dam'd by an earthquake, half-brother to the cholera, nearly related to the smallpox on his mother's side!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »