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| Volume 1.3 | This View’s Prose | February 25, 2002 |
| Music and Life Itself | ||||
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There is a kinship between mathematics and music. But, as an analogy or diagram of the creative process in the universe, music has the advantage of including both the scientific precision, and the depth and richness of life itself. It always seemed to me that music, being itself a creative art, and at the same time detached from particulars, could analogize and thus elucidate many baffling questions. Its answers could not be taken as evidence, of course, but they might indicate the way in which a problem might be solved. The figurative use of one of its technical terms — “the resolution of discords” — has passed into common speech, but every musician knows that in his most intricate and subtle modulations he is doing something which somehow represents the way in which things may really happen. He is working out the golden mathematics of the process of wisdom whereby all things are ordered from end to end. |
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Alfred Noyes (1880-1958) |
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| from The Unknown God Chapter VIII |
| Life in Small-Town (“Red”) America | ||||
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The real reason for the lack of books about America’s heartland by the people who actually live here is the assumption that small-town residents can’t possibly live rich and interesting lives without Starbucks, modern art, and expensive universities. Brooks himself confides that he wouldn’t want to live in Red America, because he finds our way of life “too unchanging.” If one is happy, though, change isn’t eagerly anticipated. Most Red Americans can’t deconstruct post-modern literature, give proper orders to a nanny, pick out a cabernet with aftertones of licorice, or quote prices from the Abercrombie and Fitch catalog. But we can raise great children, wire our own houses, make beautiful and delicious creations with our two hands, talk casually and comfortably about God, repair a small engine, recognize a good maple sugar tree, tell you the histories of our towns and the hopes of our neighbors, shoot a gun and run a chainsaw without fear, calculate the bearing load of a roof, grow our own asparagus, live in peace without car alarms, security guards, or therapists—even find the same wife a lifetime source of interest and joy. |
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Blake Hurst |
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| from The Plains vs. The Atlantic in The American Enterprise March 2002 |
| The Defense of Liberty | ||||
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| What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence?
It is not our frowning battlements, our bristling seacoasts, the guns of
our war steamers, or the strength of our gallant and disciplined army. These
are not our reliance against a resumption of tyranny in our fair land. All
of them may be turned against our liberties, without making us stronger
or weaker for the struggle. Our reliance is in the love of liberty
which God has planted in our bosoms. Our defense is in the preservation
of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands,
everywhere. Destroy this spirit, and you have planted the seeds of despotism
around your own doors. Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage,
and you are preparing your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample
on the rights of those around you, you have lost the genius of your own
independence, and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises. |
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| Abraham Lincoln
(1809-1865) |
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| from Speech at
Edwardsville, Illinois, September 11, 1858 Collected Works Volume III p. 95 |
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