[Sunday, February 19, 2006]

Joseph, I don’t know if it was you planting ideas in my head – where do ideas come from, anyway? – but I thought today I would ask you to talk to me about Emerson in your life. That is the connection in which you first came to me, and for some reason I never pursued it. Because of my problems with R, I suppose.[R was a woman in my Gateway. The connection will become obvious as you read this.] Talk to me of your relation to Emerson.

People in your day don’t think much about Emerson, not like in mine. When I was a boy he set us on fire with possibilities – our possibilities, you see – and his influence just kept growing. From your time looking backwards, your people are inclined to see him as the respectable elder statesman whose words seem stuffy and old-fashioned. Spencer and others used his thoughts like “compensation” to justify the worst kind of social robbery. And, Emerson is more English, more old-fashioned to you, so he’s almost needing a translator. Continue reading 35 – Emerson and young men

[Friday, February 17, 2006]

All right. It is 8 a.m., nearly, the start of a cloud-heavy morning. If you’re ready to answer [my brother] Paul’s question – what is the real challenge of our time, what is the equivalent of the Civil War to us – I’m ready to hear it.

You have heard it many times, each time in a slightly different context. You have expressed it many times, enough that it is just another of your beliefs. What is your Iona book about, after all?

Pardon us while we circle around the subject. You know how a dog has to circle before it can lie down and sleep, it is a reassuring habit.

Look at what the crisis can’t be. That will add conviction. Continue reading 34 – Our struggle

[Thursday, February 16, 2006]

(11 a.m.) All right. Typed that up and sent it out. Continue?

Your second questions was, do we communicate up here, and – to throw ‘em both in together – if what you do there affects what I can do here.

Sure we communicate! We do nothing but communicate. But it ain’t exactly like conveying information; more like communicating states of being. This won’t be all that easy for you to get, and maybe we’ll have to call in somebody else, but let’s try. What you learn today, what happens to you inside and outside, changes you, a little or a lot. In your bodies, you don’t notice these changes so much, or so quickly. So what you regard as communicating, we think of as smoke signals! That is, you ain’t communicating very much! You’re hinting. Continue reading 33 – Communication

[7 a.m. Thursday, February 16, 2006]

It feels like I haven’t heard from myself this good while. I have been reading, reading. Sam Watkins and then Elisha Hunt Rhodes. And a bit of re-reading – Far Memory by Joan Grant.

[Watkins, who had been a private in the Confederate army, wrote a book of memoirs called Company Aytch. Rhodes began as a private and rose to the rank of colonel in the Union Army. All for the Union is a book compiled from his diary and letters by his great-grandson. Both men were extensively cited in Ken Burns’ “Civil War” series.]

I wound up liking Elisha Hunt Rhodes very much, though I suspect that he and I would be farther apart in temperament than Sam Watkins and I would be. But his political opinions and his determination to do his duty are very appealing. He found that he liked army life. I don’t think that Sam Watkins ever would have, even if he’d been paid and fed. But then Watkins joined after he was 30, and Rhodes before he was 20.

All right, to work. Joseph, what is your reaction to Watkins and Rhodes? And do you communicate “up” there? And, does my watching “the Civil War” facilitate communication for you somehow? And, what in general is your life there? (May want others on that last question.) And don’t think I don’t suspect prompting when I come up with bright questions like these. Continue reading 32 – God-fearing men