Zoey Slater's List: AmCon

• A residence at Brook Farm does not involve either a community of money, of opinions, or of sympathy. The motives which bring individuals there, may be as various as their numbers.
• believe that an improved state of existence would be developed in association, and are therefore anxious to join it. Another class consists of those who join with the view of bettering their condition, by being exempted from some portion of worldly strife. The third portion, comprises those who have their own development or education, for their principal object.
• mental freedom
• While, however, this security is an essential element in success, riches would, on the other hand, be as fatal as poverty, to the true progress of such an institution.
• Now Brook Farm is at present such an institution. It is not a community: it is not truly an association: it is merely an aggregation of persons, and lacks that oneness of spirit, which is probably needful to make it of deep and lasting value to mankind.

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• Alexis de Tocqueville warned that the tendency of Americans to do their own thing could very likely doom the country. The Founding Fathers beseeched people to remain involved in community affairs. And today, a chorus of critics worries that the philosophy of individualism has slipped its original moorings, threatening the well-being of the nation and, ironically, individuals themselves.
• Not until the mid-1800s did the pursuit of individual fulfillment come to connote a retreat from the group. Ralph Waldo Emerson first preached the concept in his 1841 essay "Self-Reliance." "Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members," he declared. "Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist." For him, the self was more important, more interesting, than the group. "I have only one doctrine," he wrote: "the infinitude of the private man." Emerson's friend Henry David Thoreau went further, deeming it necessary for him to physically part with society to develop his own integrity. And Walt Whitman, in poems such as "Song of Myself," introduced to the country what Berkeley sociologist Robert Bellah calls "expressive individualism," the valuing of personal pleasures such as sensuality and leisure above all else--something that would have been anathema in the religion-dominated Colonies

• One of the things that made drudgery palatable was equal compensation. A child milking a cow was paid the same hourly rate as a former Harvard professor of Classics teaching in the school. At a time when most were given little choice in the type or circumstance of their labor, and were frequently underpaid, Brook Farm was revolutionary. Neither social class, nor age, nor gender determined a member's community status or remuneration.
• Ripley realized that the "purely democratic, Christian principles on which he had established the community wouldn't provide even a single meal for seventy Brook Farmers living on a dairy farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts."
• With this reorganization the community parted company with the individualistic wing of Transcendentalism.
• In the first place we have abolished domestic servitude. In the second place we have secured thorough education for all. And in the third place we have established justice to the laborer, and ennobled industry.

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• The strength of Ripley's attraction to utopian experimentation may have been partly an outgrowth of his increasing dissatisfaction with the ministry as a vehicle for social reform. The state of the Purchase Street Church is described succinctly by Frothingham. "The neighborhood deteriorated; money fell short; the minister had misgivings in regard to his fitness for professional work." Ripley preached a farewell sermon to his congregation on March 28, 1841, and Brook Farm became a reality in April. One of the most famous utopian experiments in American history, Brook Farm was in some senses a success, but disbanded in 1847 after a disastrous fire brought financial collapse. Its historical reputation has been enormously enhanced by the cultural significance of the Transcendentalist movement and by the participation, as members or interested visitors, of such figures as Ripley, John Sullivan Dwight , Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Henry Channing, and Margaret Fuller. Brook Farm officially declared itself a Fourierist Phalanx in 1845. Ripley then established The Harbinger, 1845-49, a periodical devoted to the exposition of Associationist theory. During its six years of life, American thinking about social reform was centered around Brook Farm. Hawthorne's dark satire of communal life, The Blithedale Romance, 1852, further extended the literary fame of the experiment.

• There is striking evidence, however, that the vibrancy of American civil society has notably declined over the past several decades.
• the United States has played a central role in systematic studies of the links between democracy and civil society. Although this is in part because trends in American life are often regarded as harbingers of social modernization, it is also because America has traditionally been considered unusually "civic" (a reputation that, as we shall later see, has not been entirely unjustified).
• Even in less exotic Western economies, however, researchers have discovered highly efficient, highly flexible "industrial districts" based on networks of collaboration among workers and small entrepreneurs. Far from being paleoindustrial anachronisms, these dense interpersonal and interorganizational networks undergird ultramodern industries, from the high tech of Silicon Valley to the high fashion of Benetton.
• The norms and networks of civic engagement also powerfully affect the performance of representative government.
• By almost every measure, Americans' direct engagement in politics and government has fallen steadily and sharply over the last generation, despite the fact that average levels of education--the best individual-level predictor of political participation--have risen sharply throughout this period. Every year over the last decade or two, millions more have withdrawn from the affairs of their communities.
• The proportion of Americans who reply that they "trust the government in Washington" only "some of the time" or "almost never" has risen steadily from 30 percent in 1966 to 75 percent in 1992.
• These trends are well known, of course, and taken by themselves would seem amenable to a strictly political explanation. Perhaps the long litany of political tragedies and scandals since the 1960s (assassinations, Vietnam, Watergate, Irangate, and so on) has triggered an understandable disgust for politics and government among Americans, and that in turn has motivated their withdrawal. I do not doubt that this common interpretation has some merit, but its limitations become plain when we examine trends in civic engagement of a wider sort.
• Religious affiliation is by far the most common associational [End Page 68] membership among Americans. Indeed, by many measures America continues to be (even more than in Tocqueville's time) an astonishingly "churched" society. For example, the United States has more houses of worship per capita than any other nation on Earth. Yet religious sentiment in America seems to be becoming somewhat less tied to institutions and more self-defined.
• The most whimsical yet discomfiting bit of evidence of social disengagement in contemporary America that I have discovered is this: more Americans are bowling today than ever before, but bowling in organized leagues has plummeted in the last decade or so.
• These new mass-membership organizations are plainly of great political importance. From the point of view of social connectedness, however, they are sufficiently different from classic "secondary associations" that we need to invent a new label--perhaps "tertiary associations."

• A third potential countertrend is much more relevant to an assessment of social capital and civic engagement. Some able researchers have argued that the last few decades have witnessed a rapid expansion in "support groups" of various sorts. Robert Wuthnow reports that fully 40 percent of all Americans claim to be "currently involved in [a] small group that meets regularly and provides support or caring for those who participate in it." ⁸  Many of these groups are religiously affiliated, but  [End Page 71] many others are not. For example, nearly 5 percent of Wuthnow's national sample claim to participate regularly in a "self-help" group, such as Alcoholics Anonymous, and nearly as many say they belong to book-discussion groups and hobby clubs.  

   The groups described by Wuthnow's respondents unquestionably represent an important form of social capital, and they need to be accounted for in any serious reckoning of trends in social connectedness. On the other hand, they do not typically play the same role as traditional civic associations. As Wuthnow emphasizes, 

   Small groups may not be fostering community as effectively as many of their proponents would like. Some small groups merely provide occasions for individuals to focus on themselves in the presence of others. The social contract binding members together asserts only the weakest of obligations. Come if you have time. Talk if you feel like it. Respect everyone's opinion. Never criticize. Leave quietly if you become dissatisfied. . . . We can imagine that [these small groups] really substitute for families, neighborhoods, and broader community attachments that may demand lifelong commitments, when, in fact, they do not. ⁹
• All three of these potential countertrends--tertiary organizations, nonprofit organizations, and support groups--need somehow to be weighed against the erosion of conventional civic organizations. One way of doing so is to consult the General Social Survey.
• Americans are also less trusting. The proportion of Americans saying that most people can be trusted fell by more than a third between 1960, when 58 percent chose that alternative, and 1993, when only 37 percent did. The same trend is apparent in all educational groups; indeed, because social trust is also correlated with education and because educational levels have risen sharply, the overall decrease in social trust is even more apparent if we control for education.
• It seems highly plausible that this social revolution should have reduced the time and energy available for building social capital.
• It seems plausible that the automobile, suburbanization, and the movement to the Sun Belt have reduced the social rootedness of the average American, but one fundamental difficulty with this hypothesis is apparent: the best evidence shows that residential stability and homeownership in America have risen modestly since 1965, and are surely higher now than during the 1950s, when civic engagement and social connectedness by our measures was definitely higher.
• A range of additional changes have transformed the American family since the 1960s--fewer marriages, more divorces, fewer children, lower real wages, and so on. Each of these changes might account for some of the slackening of civic engagement, since married, middle-class parents are generally more socially involved than other people.
• There
• is reason to believe that deep-seated technological trends are radically "privatizing" or "individualizing" our use of leisure time and thus disrupting many opportunities for social-capital formation. The most
• obvious and probably the most powerful instrument of this revolution is television.

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• All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature. We have theories of races and of functions, but scarcely yet a remote approach to an idea of creation.

• Genuine belief seems to have left us. The underlying principles of the States are not honestly believ'd in, (for all this hectic glow, and these melodramatic screamings,) nor is humanity itself believ'd in. What penetrating eye does not everywhere see through the mask? The spectacle is appaling. We live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout. The men believe not in the women, nor the women in the men. A scornful superciliousness rules in literature. The aim of all the littérateurs is to find something to make fun of.
• Huge and mighty are our days, our republican lands -- and most in their rapid shiftings, their changes, all in the interest of the cause. As I write this particular passage, (November, 1868,) the din of disputation rages around me. Acrid the temper of the parties, vital the pending questions. Congress convenes; the President sends his message; reconstruction is still in abeyance; the nomination and the contest for the twenty-first Presidentiad draw close, with loudest threat and bustle. Of these, and all the like of these, the eventuations I know not; but well I know that behind them, and whatever their eventuations, the vital things remain safe and certain, and all the needed work goes on. Time, with soon or later superciliousness, disposes of Presidents, Congressmen, party platforms, and such. Anon, it clears the stage of each and any mortal shred that thinks itself so potent to its day; and at and after which, (with precious, golden exceptions once or twice in a century,) all that relates to sir potency is flung to moulder in a burial-vault, and no one bothers himself the least bit about it afterward. But the People ever remain, tendencies continue, and all the idiocratic transfers in unbroken chain go on.
• In a few years the dominion-heart of America will be far inland, toward the West. Our future national capital may not be where the present one is. It is possible, nay likely, that in less than fifty years, it will migrate a thousand or two miles, will be re-founded, and every thing belonging to it made on a different plan, original, far more superb. The main social, political, spine-character of the States will probably run along the Ohio, Missouri and Mississippi rivers, and west and north of them, including Canada. Those regions, with the group of powerful brothers toward the Pacific, (destined to the mastership of that sea and its countless paradises of islands,) will compact and settle the traits of America, with all the old retain'd, but more expanded, grafted on newer, hardier, purely native stock. A giant growth, composite from the rest, getting their contribution, absorbing it, to make it more illustrious. From the north, intellect, the sun of things, also the idea of unswayable justice, anchor amid the last, the wildest tempests. From the south the living soul, the animus of good and bad, haughtily admitting no demonstration but its own. While from the west itself comes solid personality, with blood and brawn, and the deep quality of all-accepting fusion.
• Political democracy, as it exists and practically works in America, with all its threatening evils, supplies a training-school for making first-class men. It is life's gymnasium, not of good only, but of all. We try often, though we fall back often. A brave delight, fit for freedom's athletes, fills these arenas, and fully satisfies, out of the action in them, irrespective of success. Whatever we do not attain, we at any rate attain the experiences of the fight, the hardening of the strong campaign, and throb with currents of attempt at least. Time is ample. Let the victors come after us. Not for nothing does evil play its part among us. Judging from the main portions of the history of the world, so far, justice is always in jeopardy, peace walks amid hourly pitfalls, and of slavery, misery, meanness, the craft of tyrants and the credulity of the populace, in some of their protean forms, no voice can at any time say, They are not. The clouds break a little, and the sun shines out -- but soon and certain the lowering darkness falls again, as if to last forever. Yet is there an immortal courage and prophecy in every sane soul that cannot, must not, under any circumstances, capitulate. Vive, the attack -- the perennial assault! Vive, the unpopular cause -- the spirit that audaciously aims -- the never-abandon'd efforts, pursued the same amid opposing proofs and precedents.
• As we have shown
• the New World including in itself the all-leveling aggregate of democracy, we show it also including the all-varied, all-permitting, all-free theorem of individuality, and erecting therefor a lofty and hitherto unoccupied framework or platform, broad enough for all, eligible to every farmer and mechanic -- to the female equally with the male -- a towering self-hood, not physically perfect only -- not satisfied with the mere mind's and learning's stores, but religious, possessing the idea of the infinite, (rudder and compass sure amid this troublous voyage, o'er darkest, wildest wave, through stormiest wind, of man's or nation's progress) -- realizing, above the rest, that known humanity, in deepest sense, is fair adhesion to itself, for purposes beyond -- and that, finally, the personality of mortal life is most important with reference to the immortal, the unknown, the spiritual, the only permanently real, which as the ocean waits for and receives the rivers, waits for us each and all.
• For America, type of progress, and of essential faith in man, above all his errors and wickedness -- few suspect how deep, how deep it really strikes. The world evidently supposes, and we have evidently supposed so too, that the States are merely to achieve the equal franchise, an elective government -- to inaugurate the respectability of labor, and become a nation of practical operatives, law-abiding, orderly and well off. Yes, those are indeed parts of the task of America; but they not only do not exhaust the progressive conception, but rather arise, teeming with it, as the mediums of deeper, higher progress. Daughter of a physical revolution -- other of the true revolutions, which are of the interior life, and of the arts. For so long as the spirit is not changed, any change of appearance is of no avail.  
• We see, as in the universes of the material kosmos, after meteorological, vegetable, and animal cycles, man at last arises, born through them, to prove them, concentrate them, to turn upon them with wonder and love -- to command them, adorn them, and carry them upward into superior realms -- so, out of the series of the preceding social and political universes, now arise these States. We see that while many were supposing things established and completed, really the grandest things always remain; and discover that the work of the New World is not ended, but only fairly begun.

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• There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the  conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he  must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though  the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can  come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground  which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new  in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor  does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one  character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none.  This sculpture in the memory is not without preestablished harmony.  The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify  of that particular ray. We but half express ourselves, and are  ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be  safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be  faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by  cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into  his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise,  shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver.  In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no  invention, no hope.
• hese are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow  faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere  is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.  Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the  better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the  liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is  conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities  and creators, but names and customs.
• Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would  gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness,  but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but  the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you  shall have the suffrage of the world.
• I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My  life is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it  should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it  should be glittering and unsteady. I wish it to be sound and sweet,  and not to need diet and bleeding. I ask primary evidence that you  are a man, and refuse this appeal from the man to his actions. I  know that for myself it makes no difference whether I do or forbear  those actions which are reckoned excellent. I cannot consent to pay  for a privilege where I have intrinsic right. Few and mean as my  gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or  the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony.
• What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people  think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual  life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and  meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who  think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is  easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in  solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the  midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of  solitude.
• Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares  not say 'I think,' 'I am,' but quotes some saint or sage. He is  ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses  under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones;  they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no  time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every  moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life  acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root  there is no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature,  in all moments alike. But man postpones or remembers; he does not  live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or,  heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee  the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with  nature in the present, above time.
• But now we are a mob. Man does not stand in awe of man, nor is  his genius admonished to stay at home, to put itself in communication  with the internal ocean, but it goes abroad to beg a cup of water of  the urns of other men. We must go alone. I like the silent church  before the service begins, better than any preaching. How far off,  how cool, how chaste the persons look, begirt each one with a  precinct or sanctuary! So let us always sit.
• But  your isolation must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must  be elevation.
• The populace think that your rejection of popular standards is  a rejection of all standard, and mere antinomianism; and the bold  sensualist will use the name of philosophy to gild his crimes. But  the law of consciousness abides. There are two confessionals, in one  or the other of which we must be shriven. You may fulfil your round  of duties by clearing yourself in the direct, or in the reflex  way. Consider whether you have satisfied your relations to father,  mother, cousin, neighbour, town, cat, and dog; whether any of these  can upbraid you. But I may also neglect this reflex standard, and  absolve me to myself. I have my own stern claims and perfect circle.  It denies the name of duty to many offices that are called duties.  But if I can discharge its debts, it enables me to dispense with the  popular code. If any one imagines that this law is lax, let him keep  its commandment one day.
• cast off  the common motives of humanity, and has ventured to trust himself for  a taskmaster
• High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight,  that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself,  that a simple purpose may be to him as strong as iron necessity is to  others!
• We are afraid of truth, afraid of  fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our age yields  no great and perfect persons. We want men and women who shall  renovate life and our social state, but we see that most natures are  insolvent, cannot satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of  all proportion to their practical force, and do lean and beg day and  night continually. Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our  occupations, our marriages, our religion, we have not chosen, but  society has chosen for us. We are parlour soldiers. We shun the  rugged battle of fate, where strength is born.
• • be ok with mistakes
• Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it  gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous,  it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific;  but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given,  something is taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old  instincts. What a contrast between the well-clad, reading, writing,  thinking American, with a watch, a pencil, and a bill of exchange in  his pocket, and the naked New Zealander, whose property is a club, a  spear, a mat, and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under!  But compare the health of the two men, and you shall see that the  white man has lost his aboriginal strength. If the traveller tell us  truly, strike the savage with a broad axe, and in a day or two the  flesh shall unite and heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch,  and the same blow shall send the white to his grave.
• The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of  his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of  muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to  tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and  so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the  street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not  observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright  calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His note-books  impair his memory; his libraries overload his wit; the  insurance-office increases the number of accidents; and it may be a  question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not  lost by refinement some energy, by a Christianity entrenched in  establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic  was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian?
• It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of  Travelling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its  fascination for all educated Americans. They who made England,  Italy, or Greece venerable in the imagination did so by sticking fast  where they were, like an axis of the earth. In manly hours, we feel  that duty is our place. The soul is no traveller
• Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of  which it is composed does not. The same particle does not rise from  the valley to the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons  who make up a nation to-day, next year die, and their experience with  them.
• My giant goes with me wherever I go
• the rage of travelling is a symptom of a deeper  unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual action
• And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on  governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance. Men have  looked away from themselves and at things so long, that they have  come to esteem the religious, learned, and civil institutions as  guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because  they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem  of each other by what each has, and not by what each is. But a  cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property, out of new respect  for his nature.
• It is only as a  man puts off all foreign support, and stands alone, that I see him to  be strong and to prevail. He is weaker by every recruit to his  banner. Is not a man better than a town?
• • Don't put your happiness in outside sources
• Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace  but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of  principles.

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• All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature.
• All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature.
• All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature.
• All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature.
• All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature.
• Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from  us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME, that is,  both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked  under this name, NATURE.
• We mean the integrity of  impression made by manifold natural objects. It is this which  distinguishes the stick of timber of the wood-cutter, from the  tree of the poet.
• The charming landscape which I saw this morning,  is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns  this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none  of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon  which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts,  that is, the poet.
• The lover of nature is he whose inward  and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has  retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.
• Under the general name of Commodity, I rank all those advantages  which our senses owe to nature. This, of course, is a benefit  which is temporary and mediate, not ultimate, like its service to  the soul.
• The ancient Greeks called the world {kosmos}, beauty. Such is the  constitution of all things, or such the plastic power of the human  eye, that the primary forms, as the sky, the mountain, the tree,  the animal, give us a delight in and for themselves; a pleasure  arising from outline, color, motion, and grouping
• First, the simple perception of natural forms is a deligh
• But this beauty of Nature which is seen and felt as beauty, is the  least part. The shows of day, the dewy morning, the rainbow,  mountains, orchards in blossom, stars, moonlight, shadows in still  water, and the like, if too eagerly hunted, become shows merely,  and mock us with their unreality. Go out of the house to see the  moon, and 't is mere tinsel; it will not please as when its light  shines upon your necessary journey. The beauty that shimmers in  the yellow afternoons of October, who ever could clutch it? Go  forth to find it, and it is gone: 't is only a mirage as you look  from the windows of diligence.
• When a noble act is  done, -- perchance in a scene of great natural beauty; when  Leonidas and his three hundred martyrs consume one day in dying,  and the sun and moon come each and look at them once in the steep  defile of Thermopylae; when Arnold Winkelried, in the high Alps,  under the shadow of the avalanche, gathers in his side a sheaf of  Austrian spears to break the line for his comrades; are not these  heroes entitled to add the beauty of the scene to the beauty of  the deed?
• Nothing is quite beautiful  alone: nothing but is beautiful in the whole. A single object is  only so far beautiful as it suggests this universal grace. The  poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musician, the architect, seek  each to concentrate this radiance of the world on one point, and  each in his several work to satisfy the love of beauty which  stimulates him to produce. Thus is Art, a nature passed through  the alembic of man. Thus in art, does nature work through the will  of a man filled with the beauty of her first works.
• Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour, and is not reminded  of the flux of all things? Throw a stone into the stream, and the  circles that propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all  influence. Man is conscious of a universal soul within or behind  his individual life, wherein, as in a firmament, the natures of  Justice, Truth, Love, Freedom, arise and shine. This universal  soul, he calls Reason: it is not mine, or thine, or his, but we  are its; we are its property and men

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• Sitting here at a small green table
   surrounded by banana trees, palms,
   and a big gumbo-limbo; palmettos
   and giant ferns filling in the under
   story, I think I�ve stumbled back to Eden,
   and, like Adam, have had to name the plants:
   Red Hot Firecrackers, Fanfare-of-Trumpets,
   Shrimp-on-a-Stick, Flaming Torch, Parrots� Claws,
   Stars-in-the-Night-Sky. I�m in a painting
   by Henri Rousseau, every frond edged in black,
   green Venetian blinds, filtering out the sun. And
   then there was evening, and then there was morning,
   a sixth day.

• There is no State in the Union with as much to record in a musical, folk lore, Social-Ethnic way as Florida has. To be sure California has the Chinese, Japanese, Philipino population which Florida lacks, but these Asiatic cultures seem so far from our own that they do not enter the stream of American culture at all. No other State in the Union has had the history of races blended and contending. Nowhere else is there such a variety of materials. Florida is still a frontier with its varying elements still unassimilated. There is still an opportunity to observe the wombs of folk culture still heavy with life. Recordings in Florida will be like backtracking a large part of the United States, Europe and Africa for these elements have been attracted here and brought a gift to Florida culture each in its own way. The drums throb: Africa by way of Cuba; Africa by way of the British West Indies; Africa by way of Haiti and Martinque; Africa by way of Central and South America. Old Spain speaks through many interpreters. Old England speaks through black, white and intermediate lips. Florida, the inner melting pot of the great melting pot -- America.