11/24/2023 0 Comments Shine perishing republic![]() It’s a personal log with nary a reference or link in it, though it occasionally includes a poem or a pleasant picture of the English countryside. Strangely enough, the blog I read most often after wood s lot is the journal of a writing man, which is almost diametrically the opposite of wood s lot. And, hey, anyone who links to Leonard Cohen articles is just all right with me. I’m always amazed, and a little awed with the extent of his links and the kind of in-depth articles he can find on an internet that increasingly seems to be dominated by sheer fluff. I have discovered new interests, though, by following some of those strange links. Now, I know virtually nothing personal about wood (and that doesnt bother me at all), but I do know that his interests and mine must be remarkably similar, though certainly not identical – I have neither the time nor the desire to plow through some of those articles he refers to. Sometimes I end up spending the entire session following the links on his page. Now, I still have my home page set to MacCentral, and I still start out by reading some news pages like the Seattle Times and the New York Times, but beyond those I have begun to spend more and more of my time on blogs.Īlmost invariably I start out with wood s lot. What’s worse, I’m not even sure why I produce one, much less why others do it.Īll I really know is that when Im not hiking I spend a lot of time on the web, and there are certain pages that I go to more often than not. Inevitably their first question is, "What is a blog?" Strangely enough, as often as I have been asked that question, I still don’t have an answer. When I tell people I’ve started writing a blog, I would like to think that their first question would be, "What’s the address of your blog?"įew friends ever get around to that question. And if we reach out, will we inevitably be pulled along with those we come to love? The dilemma that each of us critical of America faces is whether to retreat within ourselves in order to save ourselves or to reach out to try to change a society that does not appear to want to change, that is happy with life as it is. It is only a matter of time before ours, too, falls, though some may find some small comfort in the fact that this poem was written almost 75 years ago so our decline may not be as "meteoric" as Jeffers envisioned.įor me, though, the most powerful, and frightening, line in the poem is beware the "love of man" for "There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught-they-say God, when he walked on earth." Those who know history are only too aware that all empires decline and fall, whether they be Egyptian, Greek, Roman, English, or American. Those, like myself, who see the source of America’s international problems stemming from our attempts to extend our capitalistic empire, rather than our democratic ideals may, indeed, sigh with regret when we realize that as early as 1926 insightful citizens were warning of the dangers of empire, a warning never taken seriously. Lest we delude ourselves into thinking America’s present crisis and people’s diverse reactions to it are anything new, this insightful, but disturbing, poem first appeared in 1926. There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught-they say-God, when he walked on earth. Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster’s feet there are left the mountains.Īnd boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant, insufferable master. You making haste, haste on decay: not blameworthy life is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenlyĪ mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing republic.īut for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening center corruption Out of the mother and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence and home to the mother. I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth. While this America settles in the mold of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire,Īnd protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens,
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