Reconciling with New England
“New England haunted the minds of Americans, who tried to read its riddle, as if for their soul’s good they must know what it meant….For it meant much to Americans that this old region should fare well, as their palladium of truth, justice, freedom and learning. They could not rest until they were reconciled to it, and until it was reconciled to them.’’
Van Wyck Brooks, in New England Indian Summer (1940)
Escaping the heat into high culture
“We climb the stone staircase
of the redstone Victorian building,
my father, my aunt, my husband carrying our baby,
escaping from the mid-July heat.
My mother is missing, dead one year.’’
— From “Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium,’’ by Jane Shore