The Athenaeum

"...the Black History of Pocahontas Island." Washpost

 "And along the way, he absorbed stories.

One of his ancestors, Charles Stewart, was profiled in an 1884 edition of Harper’s Monthly magazine under the headline, “My Life as a Slave.” Richard Stewart tells how Charles, who had money because he was a champion horse trainer, went to Richmond to buy a wife for $350.

After four years, Betsey Dandridge had borne him three children and done untold amounts of laundry and cooking. But Charles grew frustrated that she wouldn’t give up voodoo, Richard Stewart said. So he took her back to Richmond, sold her — and the children — for $350 and used the money to buy a horse. Betsey and the children wound up somewhere in Chesterfield County, but Richard Stewart doesn’t know their fates.

Slaves and free blacks lived side by side on Pocahontas Island, which was a port on the Appomattox before joining the city of Petersburg. It became an island after a canal was built in the late 1700s. Today, it’s more of a peninsula, as the main channel of the river clogged after a flood in the early 1970s.

Petersburg was one of the busiest slave markets in the old South, but it also had one of the highest concentrations of free blacks, attracted by jobs and by the presence of a community of their own. For a time, in the spirit of liberty after the Revolutionary War, a few planters freed their slaves."  Washpost

------------

I wonder if any of this is mentioned anywhere in the Smithsonian Museum of African-American History and Culture recently opened on the National Mall in Washington DC?  pl

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/one-mans-quest-to-preserve-the-haunting-black-history-of-pocahontas-island/2016/09/26/b79f9b2c-7abf-11e6-beac-57a4a412e93a_story.html

"True Detective," A socio-cultural review

 

"The second season has received generally positive reviews, however many critics feel it is not as strong as the first. On Rotten Tomatoes, the season has a rating of 65%, based on 72 reviews, with an average rating of 6.4/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "True Detective‍ '​s second season stands on its own as a solid police drama, with memorable moments and resonant relationships outweighing predictable plot twists."^[42] On Metacritic, the season has a score of 61 out of 100, based on 41 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".^[43]

David Hinckley of the New York Daily News gave it a very positive review, and wrote "It's still the kind of show that makes TV viewers reach for phrases like 'golden age of television drama'" and that "the second installment of True Detective goes out of the way not to echo the first."^[44] Hank Stuever of The Washington Post gave it a generally positive review, praising the performances, and wrote, "There is something still lugubrious and overwrought about True Detective, but there's also a mesmerizing style to it — it's imperfect, but well made."^[45]

A more mixed review came from Brian Lowry of Variety, who wrote "Although generally watchable, the inspiration that turned the first [season] into an obsession for many seems to have drained out of writer Nic Pizzolatto's prose."^[46]" 

wiki

----------------------

IMO both seasons are evidence of an emerging Golden Age in American TV drama productions.  The quality of writing, production and direction were all superb.

These series exist at a number of artistic levels.  They can be seen as mere cop show extravaganzas.  At that level they work remarkably well.

More importantly, they are, IMO, powerful metaphors for the general disintegration of what were not long ago well accepted cultural norms involving personal behavior and expectations regarding the functions of government.

This is not to say that there was a utopian age in an America that worked well for all, but there were enough shared values in pre-60s America for it to have been possible to say without irony that there were such things as coherent national and regional cultures.  Such a thing as national or regional epic was possible based on shared values.  IMO and evidently in the collective mind of the "True Detective" crew such coherent, functioning cultures are no more.  They were systematically destroyed over the last fifty years by those who sought a brave new world disorganized on the basis of and excused by a drive for extreme forms of social justice and leveling. This drive has treated all tradition as enemy.  This brave new world has resulted, once again IMO, in a Hobbesian universe in which the juggernaut of "progress" rolls over and crushes American social institutions one by one.  The latest victims of this institutional destruction are the police, the guardians of social order.  In the new and wonderfully dystopian America, policemen who have done their duty in defense of life and property are persecuted and dismissed by politicians and police chiefs who are mere warriors in the struggle of all against all.  There are, of course policemen guilty of egregious misconduct as in the case of the fool in North Charleston, S.C. who shot a fleeing man in the back, but what is happening in the media is a general assault on the policing powers of the states and cities.

Season 1 of "True Detective" focused on this kind of descent into dystopia in Louisiana and East Texas.  My impression is that the writer and director simply are more familiar with that part of the country and were more comfortable with a regional format as an "opening gun."

Season 2 is set in California and more closely devoted to Southern California, a lurking abscess in the fabric of the America that once was.  In that world of the dark imaginings of the "True Detective" artists government is a cesspool of money corruption and selfish striving for personal gain that know no limits.

IMO this series will not live long.  In season 2 the bad guys win and consolidate their gains, ready to move on to new depths.  Americans, especially flyover Americans are unaccustomed to spectacles that do not end well in reward of virtue.  "Put a ribbon around it" is a common exhortation in US TV production.  This means that happy endings are expected and demanded.   "True Detective" puts paid to that distortion of reality.  In the "True Detective" world there are no Yellow Brick Roads, Lassie does not come home and Shirley Temple does not dance with Bojangles Robinson.

THE PEOPLE, the real people sense the decline of their way of life and its rejection by the Borgist elites.  The unhappiness of THE PEOPLE can be seen in the reaction to Trump and Sanders.  pl  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Detective_(season_2)

Oren's Anti-American Book

"Oren’s contention that by publicly airing differences with Israel, Obama broke with a long-standing principle that there should never be “daylight” in the relationship. Really? To take just a few examples, Dwight Eisenhower slammed Israel for the 1956 Suez operation and forced it into a humiliating retreat; Gerald Ford froze arms deliveries and announced a reassessment of the relationship as a way of pressing Israel to withdraw from the Sinai; Jimmy Carter clashed repeatedly with Prime Minister Menachem Begin before, during and after the 1978 Camp David summit. Ronald Reagan denounced Israel’s strike on the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq and enraged Jerusalem by selling surveillance planes to Saudi Arabia; George H.W. Bush blocked loan guarantees to Israel over settlements; Bill Clinton clashed publicly with Israel over the size of proposed West Bank withdrawals; George W. Bush called for a settlement freeze in the 2002 road map for peace and afterward repeatedly criticized Israel for construction in the West Bank. In other words, Oren has a point — except in the case of virtually every Republican and Democratic U.S. administration since Israel’s founding."  Washpost

----------------

The most remarkable thing about this book review is the willingness of the Washington Post to publish it.  The Post is a newspaper that is; pro-Zionist, never saw a minority they did not love, ant-Southern (especially Virginia), and wildly in love with gayness.

Why would they publish this?  "Is a puzzlement!"  pl 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/bibis-man-in-dc-still-spinning-for-the-boss/2015/06/26/67b36c70-1921-11e5-bd7f-4611a60dd8e5_story.html

 

Gallipoli and its Alternative

World War I anniversaries are with us until 1918 when Peace Treaty anniversaries are sure to take over.

Among the 100 marks coming up is Gallipoli, a vague factoid in my imagination until I saw the movie many years ago. More recently taken up with Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, I have become curious about WWI in the Middle East.

Scott Anderson's Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East though focused on Lawrence's efforts to organize the Arabs and Bedouin against the Ottomans looks closely at the alternative to Gallipoli. Britain's military establishment in Egypt including Lawrence, a lowly lieutenant, urged London and Churchill to begin the attack at Alexandretta, a lightly defended port in northwest Syria quite near Aleppo. It would relieve the Ottoman Empire of its Arab possessions, cut the railroad south to Medina, and remove the threat of an attack on the Suez Canal.

A bit of what-if history, but given the casualties of Gallipoli would it have been a better choice?

Australia and New Zealand, which supplied the troops at Gallipoli, will celebrate this 100th anniversary on Anzac Day, April 25.

Ataturk, the Turkish victor at Gallipoli and subsequently the head of modern Turkey offered this memorial on a monument at Anzac Cove where the troops landed.

"Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives ... you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours ... You, the mothers, who sent their sons from far away countries wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well." 1934

Margaret Steinfels

"Neoliberalism is our Frankenstein..." Salon

"... most Americans have by now surrendered to a blitz of propaganda wherein Russia and its leadership are cast as Siberian beasts, accepting as truth tales the National Enquirer would be embarrassed to run. In Europe, Greeks and Spaniards show us up, indeed, as a supine, spiritless people incapable of response or any resistance to the onslaught. There is this, too.

At writing, Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s imaginative new finance minister, has just made his first formal effort to present European counterparts with new ideas to get foreign debts of €240 billion ($271 billion) off the books and the Greek economy back in motion. These ideas can work. Even creditor institutions acknowledge that Greece cannot pay its debts as they are now structured. But at a session in Brussels Wednesday, the European Union’s arms remained folded.

Also at writing, the Poroshenko government in Ukraine appears to have recommitted to a cease-fire signed last September in Minsk and promptly broken. It is not surprising given Kiev’s very evident desperation on all fronts. But neither would it be if Poroshenko once again reneges. There is a sensible solution on the table now, but these are not people who have so far been given to one.

There is something tragically irrational driving both of these crises. The genesis of each, at least nominally, is the question of whether markets serve society or it is the other way around. Economic conflict, then, has been transformed into humanitarian disasters. This is what Greece and Ukraine have most fundamentally in common."  Francis Smith in Salon

------------------------

This is a kind of general field theory of what has gone wrong.  pl

http://www.salon.com/2015/02/12/neoliberalism_is_our_frankenstein_greece_and_ukraine_are_the_hot_spots_of_a_new_war_for_supremacy/

Yin and Yang in Chinese Hand Combat - Stan Henning

 

 

                                                                    Yin and Yang in           

                                                                Chinese Hand Combat 

                                                                            and  

                                                                   National Affairs

 

The title of this short piece may seem rather strange until one pieces together the 

relevant references over the centuries.  The first of these in the martial arts realm 

dates to about 600 BC in the Spring and Autumn Annals of Wu and Yue : “The 

principles of all hand combat are firm spirit within and calmness reflected 

without”. Next is adherence to the opposite attributes of Yin and Yang in 

hand combat as expressed in the Maiden of Yue story about 200 BC. Then 

comes the Confucian concept of national affairs in the Record of History (300 

BC): “when there are civil matters there must be martial preparedness and when 

there are martial matters there must be civil preparedness.” Interestingly, the 

preceding references all adhere to a Taoist worldview of interacting opposites.

 

As for the Internal School of boxing described by Huang Zongxi (1610- 1695), it 

appears to have been meant as a disguised expression of his “firm spirit within” 

reflecting dissatisfaction with Manchu rule as opposed to an actual school of boxing.

 

Following the establishment of Manchu rule a number of Chinese intellectuals 

appear to have continued to disguisedly express their dissatisfaction through 

focussing on the Taiji concept of interacting opposites. The first of these was 

Wang Yuyou (1615-1684) who retreated to Mount Wugong where he wrote his 

Thirteen Saber Methods which contained a section titled Taiji Connected Sabre 

Essentials. Founder of the School of Practical Learning, Yan Yuan (1635-1704),

and his partner, Li Gong (1659-1733), intellectual friends of Wang Yuyou, also 

practiced saber. Li Gong’s calendar (Nianpu) notes his mention of Yin-Yang, 

Wuxing (5 elements) and Taiji. Then there was Chang Naizhou (1724-1783) who 

described focused energy as martial preparedness or the balance that is Taiji. 

There was even an ostensible 1784 Boxing Classic Important Boxing Methods by 

Zhang Kongzhao found in Shaolin Monastery which describes the term Taiji as 

representing the concept of central focus in one’s maneuvering.

 

The fact is that the Taiji concept is applicable to all Chinese martial arts - it 

reflects the Chinese Taoist world view of the interaction of opposites which is an

essential element of Chinese martial arts theory regardless of style. It appears 

that in this environment Wu Yuxiang (1812-1880) chose to name his style of 

boxing Taijiquan in the early 1850’s and it is interesting that he claimed that the 

original source was an individual named Wang Zongyue which translates to 

“Wang who honors Yue" or the anti-Jin hero “Yue Fei” (1103-1142). And it was in 

this environment that the Confucian concept of “martial preparedness” arose at 

the national level to ultimately overthrow Manchu rule.

Stan Henning 25 Jan 2015

Down By The Riverside: Pete Seeger, 1919-2014

As Charles Pierce put it in his Politics Blog eulogy:

"I have no intention of marking Pete Seeger's passing by relitigating the Cold War. A lot of very good people paid a ghastly and inordinate price for having spent the 1930s and 1940s looking for a solution to an economic catastrophe outside a political spectrum that ran from Herbert Hoover to Huey Long. Seeger spent his life in the most honorable way possible -- he tried to teach America about itself. First, he helped teach it about itself through all the music it had forgotten, a darker and infinitely more fascinating place than the America that was selling itself Brylcreem on the TV, an America of murder ballads, and of the pain wrought in music of all its lost promises, and of the hope that the music itself could redeem those lost promises..." 

 

Pete Seeger, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee- "Down By The Riverside" 

 

 

This Land Is Your Land
Words and Music by Woody Guthrie

This land is your land This land is my land
From California to the New York island; 
From the red wood forest to the Gulf Stream waters 
This land was made for you and Me.

As I was walking that ribbon of highway, 
I saw above me that endless skyway: 
I saw below me that golden valley: 
This land was made for you and me.

I've roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps 
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts; 
And all around me a voice was sounding: 
This land was made for you and me.

When the sun came shining, and I was strolling, 
And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling, 
As the fog was lifting a voice was chanting: 
This land was made for you and me.

As I went walking I saw a sign there 
And on the sign it said "No Trespassing." 
But on the other side it didn't say nothing, 
That side was made for you and me.

In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people, 
By the relief office I seen my people; 
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking 
Is this land made for you and me?

Nobody living can ever stop me, 
As I go walking that freedom highway; 
Nobody living can ever make me turn back 
This land was made for you and me.

 

Bonus Track:  Pete Seeger & Johnny Cash Sing "Worried Man Blues"

 

 

 

-Maureen Lang

 

 

A Yuletide Omnibus

 

(originally published here on 12/10/09)

 

Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes

Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated,

The bird of dawning singeth all night long:

And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad,

The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike,

No fairy takes nor witch hath power to charm,

So hallow'd and so gracious is the time.

 

-Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 1

 

For your Yuletide enjoyment, here are a few Christmas-themed short stories suitable for those long evenings sitting by the inglenook (courtesy of eastoftheweb.com):

A Kidnapped Santa Claus . . . L. Frank Baum  One might think that Santa Claus would have no enemies on all the earth ... then the Daemons came along.   The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle . . . Arthur Conan Doyle  A Christmas mystery for detective Sherlock Holmes begins with a lost hat.   How Santa Claus Came To Simpson's Bar . . . Bret Harte  On Christmas Eve in a remote settlement cut off by heavy flooding, a group of men pay a visit to a deprived boy.   The Fir Tree . . . Hans Christian Andersen  The Yuletide tale of a young fir tree that wants to grow up. The Gift of the Magi . . . O. Henry  A tragic, ironic Christmas for one hard up couple.   Markheim . . . Robert Louis Stevenson  Markeim arrives at an antique dealer's on Christmas day, ostensibly to buy a present for a lady. A tale of evil and its nature.   Bertie's Christmas Eve . . . Saki  Bertie Steffink takes action against his disapproving relatives.   Captain Eli's Best Ear . . . Frank Stockton  Two reclusive, retired ship's Captains decide to celebrate Christmas for the first time in years.   And a few favorites of my own: The Burglar's Christmas- Willa Cather At Christmas Time- Anton Chekhov A Child's Christmas In Wales- Dylan Thomas A Christmas Memory- Truman Capote A Miserable Merry Christmas (from The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens)   One Christmas Eve- Langston Hughes Susie’s Letter from Santa- Mark Twain Our Lady's Juggler- Anatole France A Christmas Dream and How It Came True- Louisa May Alcott The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton (from The Pickwick Papers)- Charles Dickens Christmas With Queen Bess (from Master Skylark)- John Bennett Dancing Dan's Christmas- Damon Runyon (added to list via comment thread- thanks, Dave)     Christmas Eve at Sea A wind is rustling "south and soft," Cooing a quiet country tune. The calm sea sighs, and far aloft the sails are ghostly in the moon. Unquiet ripples lisp and purr, A block there pipes and chirps i' the sheave, The wheel-ropes jar, the reef-points stir Faintly --and it is Christmas Eve. The hushed sea seems to hold her breath, and o'er the giddy, swaying spars, Silent and excellent as Death, The dim blue skies are bright with stars. Dear God -- they shone in Palestine Like this, and yon pale moon serene Looked down among the lowing kine On Mary and the Nazarene. The angels called from deep to deep, The burning heavens felt the thrill, startling the flocks of silly sheep And lonely shepherds on the hill. To-night beneath the dripping bows where flashing bubbles burst and throng, The bow-wash murmurs and sighs and soughs A message from the angels' song. The moon goes nodding down the west, The drowsy helmsman strikes the bell; Rex Judaorum natus est, I charge you, brothers, sing Nowell, Nowell, Rex Judaorum natus est. -John Masefield             Christmas! 'Tis the season for kindling the fire of hospitality in the hall, the genial fire of charity in the heart. -Washington Irving

Wishing You All A Joyous Holiday Season!

-Maureen Lang

Veterans Day 2013- "When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality..."

(this post first published on The Athenaeum 11/9/11)

During the First World War, Ernest Hemingway volunteered to serve in Italy as an ambulance driver with the American Red Cross. In June 1918, while running a mobile canteen dispensing chocolate and cigarettes for soldiers, he was wounded by Austrian mortar fire. "Then there was a flash, as when a blast-furnace door is swung open, and a roar that started white and went red," he recalled in a letter home.

Despite his injuries, Hemingway carried a wounded Italian soldier to safety and was injured again by machine-gun fire. For his bravery, he received the Silver Medal of Valor from the Italian government—one of the first Americans so honored.

Hemingway in Italy, 1918.

Commenting on this experience years later in Men at War, Hemingway wrote: "When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed; not you. . . . Then when you are badly wounded the first time you lose that illusion and you know it can happen to you. After being severely wounded two weeks before my nineteenth birthday I had a bad time until I figured out that nothing could happen to me that had not happened to all men before me. Whatever I had to do men had always done. If they had done it then I could do it too and the best thing was not to worry about it."

Recuperating for six months in a Milan hospital, Hemingway fell in love with Agnes von Kurowsky, an American Red Cross nurse. At war's end, he returned to his home in Oak Park, Illinois, a different man. His experience of travel, combat, and love had broadened his outlook. Yet while his war experience had changed him dramatically, the town he returned to remained very much the same.

Two short stories (written years later) offer insights into his homecoming and his understanding of the dilemmas of the returned war veteran. In "Soldier's Home" Howard Krebs returns home from Europe later than many of his peers. Having missed the victory parades, he is unable to reconnect with those he left behind—especially his mother, who cannot understand how her son has been changed by the war.

"Hemingway's great war work deals with aftermath," stated author Tobias Wolff at the Hemingway centennial celebration. "It deals with what happens to the soul in war and how people deal with that afterward. The problem that Hemingway set for himself in stories like 'Soldier's Home' is the difficulty of telling the truth about what one has been through. He knew about his own difficulty in doing that."

After living for months with his parents, during which time he learned from Agnes that she had fallen in love with another man, he decamped with two friends to his family's Michigan summer cottage, where he had learned to hunt and fish as a young boy. The trip would be the genesis of "Big Two-Hearted River"—a story that follows one of Hemingway's best known fictional characters, Nick Adams, recently returned from war, on a fishing trip in northern Michigan.

Hemingway in Oak Park IL, 1919.

In the story, Hemingway never actually mentions the war and the injuries Nick has sustained in it—they simply loom below the surface. In this and other stories in his first major collection, In Our Time, Hemingway does more than advance a narrative; he also debuts a new style of writing fiction.

"The way we write about war or even think about war was affected fundamentally by Hemingway," stated Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., another speaker at the Hemingway centennial. In the early 1920s, in reaction to their experience of world war, Hemingway and other modernists lost faith in the central institutions of Western civilization. One of those institutions was literature itself. Nineteenth-century novelists were prone to a florid and elaborate style of writing. Hemingway, using a distinctly American vernacular, created a new style of fiction "in which meaning is established through dialogue, through action, and silences—a fiction in which nothing crucial—or at least very little—is stated explicitly."

"Hemingway was at the crest of a wave of modernists," noted fellow centennial panelist and book critic Gail Caldwell, "that were rebelling against the excesses and hypocrisy of Victorian prose. The First World War is the watershed event that changes world literature as well as how Hemingway responded to it."

(Courtesy of the National Archives)

 

May all Athenaeum/Sic Semper readers, commenters, & posters spend at least part of this Veterans Day with those they love the most.   

-Maureen Lang

 

Labor Day 2013- Fanfare For The Common Man: Aaron Copland/A Song For Occupations: Walt Whitman

                                           (originally published on The Athenaeum 9/1/10)
        
    Fanfare For The Common Man- Aaron Copland 

 

A Song For Occupations

-Walt Whitman

1

A song for occupations!

In the labor of engines and trades and the labor of fields I find the developments,

And find the eternal meanings.

Workmen and Workwomen!

Were all educations practical and ornamental well display'd out of me, what would it amount to?

Were I as the head teacher, charitable proprietor, wise statesman, what would it amount to?

Were I to you as the boss employing and paying you, would that satisfy you?

The learn'd, virtuous, benevolent, and the usual terms,

A man like me and never the usual terms.

Neither a servant nor a master I,

I take no sooner a large price than a small price, I will have my own whoever enjoys me,

I will be even with you and you shall be even with me.

If you stand at work in a shop I stand as nigh as the nighest in the same shop,

If you bestow gifts on your brother or dearest friend I demand as good as your brother or dearest friend,

If your lover, husband, wife, is welcome by day or night, I must be personally as welcome,

If you become degraded, criminal, ill, then I become so for your sake,

If you remember your foolish and outlaw'd deeds, do you think I cannot remember my own foolish and outlaw'd deeds?

If you carouse at the table I carouse at the opposite side of the table,

If you meet some stranger in the streets and love him or her, why I often meet strangers in the street and love them.

Why what have you thought of yourself?

Is it you then that thought yourself less?

Is it you that thought the President greater than you?

Or the rich better off than you? or the educated wiser than you?

(Because you are greasy or pimpled, or were once drunk, or a thief,

Or that you are diseas'd, or rheumatic, or a prostitute,

Or from frivolity or impotence, or that you are no scholar and never saw your name in print,

Do you give in that you are any less immortal?)

2

Souls of men and women! it is not you I call unseen, unheard, untouchable and untouching,

It is not you I go argue pro and con about, and to settle whether you are alive or no,

I own publicly who you are, if nobody else owns.

Grown, half-grown and babe, of this country and every country, in-doors and out-doors, one just as much as the other, I see,

And all else behind or through them.

The wife, and she is not one jot less than the husband,

The daughter, and she is just as good as the son,

The mother, and she is every bit as much as the father.

Offspring of ignorant and poor, boys apprenticed to trades,

Young fellows working on farms and old fellows working on farms,

Sailor-men, merchant-men, coasters, immigrants,

All these I see, but nigher and farther the same I see,

None shall escape me and none shall wish to escape me.

I bring what you much need yet always have,

Not money, amours, dress, eating, erudition, but as good,

I send no agent or medium, offer no representative of value, but offer the value itself.

There is something that comes to one now and perpetually,

It is not what is printed, preach'd, discussed, it eludes discussion and print,

It is not to be put in a book, it is not in this book,

It is for you whoever you are, it is no farther from you than your hearing and sight are from you,

It is hinted by nearest, commonest, readiest, it is ever provoked by them.

You may read in many languages, yet read nothing about it,

You may read the President's message and read nothing about it there,

Nothing in the reports from the State department or Treasury department, or in the daily papers or weekly papers,

Or in the census or revenue returns, prices current, or any accounts of stock.

3

The sun and stars that float in the open air,

The apple-shaped earth and we upon it, surely the drift of them is something grand,

I do not know what it is except that it is grand, and that it is happiness,

And that the enclosing purport of us here is not a speculation or bon-mot or reconnoissance,

And that it is not something which by luck may turn out well for us, and without luck must be a failure for us,

And not something which may yet be retracted in a certain contingency.

The light and shade, the curious sense of body and identity, the greed that with perfect complaisance devours all things,

The endless pride and outstretching of man, unspeakable joys and sorrows,

The wonder every one sees in every one else he sees, and the wonders that fill each minute of time forever,

What have you reckon'd them for, camerado?

Have you reckon'd them for your trade or farm-work? or for the profits of your store?

Or to achieve yourself a position? or to fill a gentleman's leisure, or a lady's leisure?

Have you reckon'd that the landscape took substance and form that it might be painted in a picture?

Or men and women that they might be written of, and songs sung?

Or the attraction of gravity, and the great laws and harmonious combinations and the fluids of the air, as subjects for the savans?

Or the brown land and the blue sea for maps and charts?

Or the stars to be put in constellations and named fancy names?

Or that the growth of seeds is for agricultural tables, or agriculture itself?

Old institutions, these arts, libraries, legends, collections, and the practice handed along in manufactures, will we rate them so high?

Will we rate our cash and business high? I have no objection,

I rate them as high as the highest--then a child born of a woman and man I rate beyond all rate.

We thought our Union grand, and our Constitution grand,

I do not say they are not grand and good, for they are,

I am this day just as much in love with them as you,

Then I am in love with You, and with all my fellows upon the earth.

We consider bibles and religions divine--I do not say they are not divine,

I say they have all grown out of you, and may grow out of you still,

It is not they who give the life, it is you who give the life,

Leaves are not more shed from the trees, or trees from the earth, than they are shed out of you.