One of our teen choristers asked me this on Sunday. She was not the first; another asked me late in the week at Todd Hall. He was insistent: “You are good. You ought to be doing this stuff.” Yet another asked the same question during our pre-course rehearsals in June.
I would love to have the opportunity. But for a variety of reasons it is not going to happen, and that is fine with me. For one thing, it is more satisfying to participate as a singer. I learned this partly from the year when I was half-of-an-organist, assisting Br. Vincent. But that is selfish; a better reason is that there are better people available, among them our own Kristin Lensch, long-time treble housemaster at the Course and this year the adult housemaster; she most certainly should be directing Courses, and not just this one. The number of people who could do this work well is not large, perhaps in the dozens, but it is sufficient without me.
For another, these days we have some choral experiences right here in the parish that are comparable to what we achieve at the RSCM Course: for example, our evensong in May.
The work that lies ahead for me is the same as it was at the end of last summer: finding a way to bring the skills home from RSCM to the parish choir, and building on them. I do wish we could have a week of intensive daily rehearsals, especially morning rehearsals when everyone is fresh, here at home instead of only at the Course. It would be good to see what we could then accomplish.
But what we have is one rehearsal a week. Thus, a resolution: make the most of the time that we have, and seek to make every rehearsal as good as the RSCM rehearsals at their best.
There was a time when I was more ambitious. I wanted to be organist/choirmaster at a notable parish or cathedral with a strong RSCM program, regular choral evensongs, choral settings of the Mass at Sunday Eucharist. Directing a few RSCM Courses would have been a culmination to that sort of career. Playing some organ recitals here and there would be good, too, and to be known and respected by other organists, part of the Inner Circle, the people that matter. Thankfully, none of these things have come my way, not even close.
What has come instead is that, little by little, we have right here in our little Midwestern parish developed a strong RSCM program, and we will soon begin our nineteenth season of First Sunday Choral Evensongs. And I have learned to play the hymns tolerably well, and even to improvise a little, something I never expected.
The three choristers who asked me about directing a Course have given me a gift: their esteem. It means the world to me that some of them think sufficiently well of my work as a choral director to say such things. With God’s help, I must live up to it, and be the director they think I am.
Tuesday, July 31, 2018
Tuesday, July 24, 2018
God's a-gonna build up Zion's walls
And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. (Revelation 21:2)Thirty years ago, I thought the repertoire was the most important aspect of the RSCM Courses, and it was. I thought that the skills I learned from the music directors were important, and they are; I was granted a solid background at the Choir College for which I am grateful, but the Courses have taught me much more. But it took me many years to learn what is most important and best about the RSCM Courses: the people.
Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God; and are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone; in whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord; in whom ye also are builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit. (Ephesians 2:19-22; see also I Peter 2:5)
Great day! Great day, the righteous marching,
Great day! God’s a-gonna build up Zion’s walls.
(spiritual, which we sang in an arrangement by Warren Martin)
It was a delight to chat with the other adults over breakfasts and dinners and suppers in the dining hall; to take an evening “field trip” to a local ice cream shoppe; to talk at length with two of my best friends in a manner that doesn’t happen in our normal routines; to share in a three-hour Lebanese dinner with “a few” (twenty-six, that is) parents and choristers after Sunday Mass.
It was a joy to see Mario again, whom I first met when he was a young tenor at the Course, his voice newly changed. He is now in college and attending this week as an adult participant, and it was good to stand by him in the tenor section for part of the week as we did so many years ago. I did not think our paths would cross again.
It was good to sing under Michael Messina, and to be reminded that we first met long ago at one of the Charlotte RSCM courses for boys, where he was organist and I was there with choristers. I had forgotten this, as I had forgotten that it was that week when I first encountered the Short Service of Orlando Gibbons. It has been important to me ever since, possibly my favorite setting of the Evening Canticles.
It was a joy to accompany my student HMB in the talent show, the two of us playing the beginning and ending of “Rejoice in the Lamb,” a project of her devising after last summer’s Course.
It was a very great joy to see Mike and Tom and Bryn do the real work of the course – looking after the young people as proctors. I remember all three of them from their childhood, and it fills my heart with joy to see them all grown up and strong and intelligent and creative and full of integrity.
It was a joy to look to the right and see the front row of trebles in the Decani, many of them from our choir at home, and all of them singing with full commitment and delight. Or right in front of me in the Cantoris, two of our teen girls, grown into intelligent choral musicians of whom any choir would be proud. Or the young choirmen among whom I stood, six of them from our parish either now or when they were younger.
For the greatest joy is singing with these people, young and old. Parry’s “I was glad”. The Sicut cervus of Palestrina, one of the great choral masterpieces of all time. Anthems with connections to two of my teachers long ago at the Choir College.
I wish it could ever be so. One of the teen boys asked me “Why can’t we do this all year?” He is right to ask, but it is not simple.
O God, whose days are without end, and whose mercies cannot be numbered: Make us, we beseech thee, deeply sensible of the shortness and uncertainty of life… (BCP p. 489)Somewhere in St. John of the Cross, we are admonished to flee from the temptation to cling to anything in this life. As soon as we clutch a moment in our arms and say “I want this to last forever,” it turns to ashes.
One of our trebles has moved to another state far to the east, and the Course was our last farewell to her and her family. It was hard, and will remain hard. One of the long-time adults was absent for reasons that are not clear to me, and I wonder when I will see her again. One of the former proctors is now a deacon and in a faraway place; he has missed two Courses in a row and again, I wonder when I will see him again. Soon enough, it will be me that is absent.
Reflecting on these things, the passage from Ephesians came to mind. How is it that we are “fitly framed together,” and what does that mean?
There are many ways, including the Holy Sacraments and Prayer. Another, and among the most powerful, is singing together. The more we do this, the stronger the bond. I hear and see it not just in the Courses, but in our choirs at home, and the Sacred Harp group that meets in our choir room, and the Skipperlings and the Family Folk Machine.
As in an earthly building, some of the most important ties for the architecture of the whole are those that, once formed, leap across the miles or the decades. No act of friendship, no song sung or played together, is in vain. The Spirit is at work in them, patiently knitting us into a whole that, until its completion, is known only to God. "I go to prepare a place for you," He says. He prepares the place by preparing us, for we are that place. Every song, every conversation between friends, every field trip for ice cream – each builds or strengthens a tie. If you will, these things are the connective tissue the binds the Body of Christ into one, the mortar and connecting rods and flying buttresses that join us into “an holy temple… an habitation of God through the Spirit.”
And so through all the length of daysWe sang well. There were many moments through the week that were especially fine: the first time in rehearsal when we really got rolling on “I was glad,” any time we sang the Sicut cervus, the moment when “Great Day” finally clicked.
thy goodness faileth never:
Good Shepherd, may I sing thy praise
within thy house for ever.
(Henry W. Baker, from “The King of love my Shepherd is”)
More than any of these: “The King of love my shepherd is.” The opening hymn for the Mass, our director called early in the week for a “descant competition” for its tune St. Columba. Any chorister or adult who wished could compose a descant for the hymn. Only two took him up on it, both of them from our parish: Jean and Caleigh. We sang both descants, with Jean’s on the second stanza and Caleigh’s at the end. They fit their respective texts perfectly, the one calm and beautiful, the other more adventurous. When it came time for the hymn in the liturgy, I was quite undone: the organ, the large acoustic, the trebles’ strong clear line soaring into the space, all bound up in my affection for these two musicians. “Cling not to these things!” I remind myself. Music more than any other art lives in the moment, eluding every effort to bind it. But it lives in the Mind of God forever.
Saturday, July 7, 2018
Book of Ways
I have been listening to Keith Jarrett’s “Book of Ways” (1989), played on the clavichord. Ninety minutes or so of it, in nineteen improvised tracks. I commend it to anyone who plays the clavichord.
The LP album is obscure and out of print, so far as I know never reissued on CD. Used copies show up on eBay, often at high prices, or you can do as I did and listen on YouTube: here is the track list.
When I built my clavichord from a kit, I was not ready for it, and it was in any event a second choice: I wanted a harpsichord, but could not afford it. I quickly found the clavichord unsuitable for practicing, not even for Bach (J. S., that is, for with the clavichord C. P. E. Bach is almost as important a name as his father). The short keys forced early fingering, of which (at the time, between undergraduate work as a pianist and organ studies later at the Choir College) I knew nothing. The music rack, such as it is – a tiny lip at the base of the lid, across the instrument from the player – was a little too distant to read easily and unwieldy to write fingerings without taking the score from the rack. So I did my practicing on my upright piano, and soon enough at the church where I was beginning to be an organist, digging through John Stainer’s organ method and the Orgelbüchlein, which taught me as it has taught almost every organist for generations.
When I set up the clavichord in my office at my current church, it quickly became a table, piled with many hundreds of octavos – five large filing boxes left to me by my predecessor upon his retirement. Dealing with them took well over a decade, the pile diminishing bit by bit as I had opportunity – and it was never a high priority. Theoretically, I could move them to the floor and play the clavichord, then put them back, but that was enough resistance to guarantee that I didn’t.
What I had not realized was that the clavichord was never as adequate for repertoire as its sister the harpsichord, or the organ and pianoforte. Instead, the clavichord exists for improvisation – of which, like early fingering, I had not the slightest clue back in the days when the instrument was new.
I wish I had known that forty years ago. I wish I had let the instrument teach me.
Nowadays my first music of the day is improvisation on the clavichord. Sometimes it is work-related: playing around with tunes that are in the coming Sunday’s services. Sometimes it is no more than harmonizing scales or simple bass-line patterns. More often by far it is simply playing whatever comes into my head and letting it develop into a little piece.
These little improvisations from Mr. Jarrett are a model to which I aspire. One gets the impression that they developed for him in a similar manner to mine, though surely they went through the sieve of repeated takes, or the playing of many more pieces than the nineteen that made it onto the LP.
I will not try to describe them in detail: this reviewer did much better. It is not clear at first what he is talking about with his numbered list, one to nineteen: these are his attempts at description for each of the tracks. For example:
Be warned: another reviewer (Richard Ginell, quoted in Wikipedia s.v. “Book of Ways”) described it thus: “Sometimes this music is charming; a lot of the time, it gets wearisome.”
I agree that playing the album straight through is not the best way to listen. Better to take one track at a time, perhaps playing it several times if you like it. Better still, then see if it might be a springboard for your own improvisation.
------------------
What then does the organ do best?
It sings.
It sings in ways that none of the stringed keyboards can match. And not just one melody: two, three, four, even five and six melodies at a time. Trio sonatas. Fugues. Counterpoint of all kinds.
Most of all, congregational hymns and songs. Alone, alongside the people, in commentary/dialogue with them (e.g., Paul Manz's organ stanzas between congregational stanzas).
But that is for another essay.
The LP album is obscure and out of print, so far as I know never reissued on CD. Used copies show up on eBay, often at high prices, or you can do as I did and listen on YouTube: here is the track list.
When I built my clavichord from a kit, I was not ready for it, and it was in any event a second choice: I wanted a harpsichord, but could not afford it. I quickly found the clavichord unsuitable for practicing, not even for Bach (J. S., that is, for with the clavichord C. P. E. Bach is almost as important a name as his father). The short keys forced early fingering, of which (at the time, between undergraduate work as a pianist and organ studies later at the Choir College) I knew nothing. The music rack, such as it is – a tiny lip at the base of the lid, across the instrument from the player – was a little too distant to read easily and unwieldy to write fingerings without taking the score from the rack. So I did my practicing on my upright piano, and soon enough at the church where I was beginning to be an organist, digging through John Stainer’s organ method and the Orgelbüchlein, which taught me as it has taught almost every organist for generations.
When I set up the clavichord in my office at my current church, it quickly became a table, piled with many hundreds of octavos – five large filing boxes left to me by my predecessor upon his retirement. Dealing with them took well over a decade, the pile diminishing bit by bit as I had opportunity – and it was never a high priority. Theoretically, I could move them to the floor and play the clavichord, then put them back, but that was enough resistance to guarantee that I didn’t.
What I had not realized was that the clavichord was never as adequate for repertoire as its sister the harpsichord, or the organ and pianoforte. Instead, the clavichord exists for improvisation – of which, like early fingering, I had not the slightest clue back in the days when the instrument was new.
I wish I had known that forty years ago. I wish I had let the instrument teach me.
Nowadays my first music of the day is improvisation on the clavichord. Sometimes it is work-related: playing around with tunes that are in the coming Sunday’s services. Sometimes it is no more than harmonizing scales or simple bass-line patterns. More often by far it is simply playing whatever comes into my head and letting it develop into a little piece.
These little improvisations from Mr. Jarrett are a model to which I aspire. One gets the impression that they developed for him in a similar manner to mine, though surely they went through the sieve of repeated takes, or the playing of many more pieces than the nineteen that made it onto the LP.
I will not try to describe them in detail: this reviewer did much better. It is not clear at first what he is talking about with his numbered list, one to nineteen: these are his attempts at description for each of the tracks. For example:
7. It tickles the feet of our childhood, making us laugh in ways we have since denied.The clavichord can do such things. The organ, for all its differing gifts, cannot. The piano? Maybe, but in a different, more outgoing way.
11. It is a love letter, a heart unfolded into the map of another heart. A dewy pasture that remembers lovelier days when the torturous end of an age was not upon us.
Be warned: another reviewer (Richard Ginell, quoted in Wikipedia s.v. “Book of Ways”) described it thus: “Sometimes this music is charming; a lot of the time, it gets wearisome.”
I agree that playing the album straight through is not the best way to listen. Better to take one track at a time, perhaps playing it several times if you like it. Better still, then see if it might be a springboard for your own improvisation.
------------------
What then does the organ do best?
It sings.
It sings in ways that none of the stringed keyboards can match. And not just one melody: two, three, four, even five and six melodies at a time. Trio sonatas. Fugues. Counterpoint of all kinds.
Most of all, congregational hymns and songs. Alone, alongside the people, in commentary/dialogue with them (e.g., Paul Manz's organ stanzas between congregational stanzas).
But that is for another essay.
Tuesday, July 3, 2018
"Old times there are not forgotten..."
In memory of those who fell in battle on this day: July 3, 1863 (reprinted from October 2011)
When I was a lad, I often visited the graveyard near home, especially the lichen-covered stone marker set flat in the ground in one corner at the highest point of the yard. In worn letters, it recorded the names of the Confederate home-guard militia soldiers who died on that hilltop, defending their home town in 1862. (There is now a fine modern monument, erected a few years ago by the Sons of the Confederacy. I left some flowers on it the last time I was there.) It was just a skirmish, not worthy of being called a battle, and the handful of boys and old men who fought there were not even soldiers of the regular Army. Their opponents in blue were indeed “real” soldiers, a nineteen-year-old future president (McKinley) among them. Despite opposition they could not hope to overcome, the militia men of the community fought as best they could and did their duty as they understood it. I doubt that slavery, or states' rights, or any of the other reasons given in history books for the war, figured in their minds that spring day.
Our county, at that time so sparsely populated and remote that it was considered a “wilderness,” sent eleven companies of men into the Army of Northern Virginia. I have stood on Seminary Ridge at Gettysburg and read the names of these eleven companies where they waited through the artillery bombardment that July morning. I have stood, and wept, beside the statue of General Lee astride Traveller looking across that field, much as he was that day in 1863 as the shattered army streamed back past him, defeated.
One of my friends, an African-American musician serving a historic church in the South, related his victory in getting the Confederate Flag removed from his church. He threatened them with a lawsuit because, he said, the Flag constituted harassment, creating a threatening and unwelcoming workplace. I did not even try to explain; I could not, not in terms that he would understand. Even my wife, who knows me better than anyone, does not understand. Her take: “The war is over. You lost. Get over it.”
I will never get over it.
The legacy of the Confederate States of America is a mixed bag. Yes, slavery was part of it. The racism of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan that followed the war must be counted as part of it. In this, the CSA was no better, and in my opinion no worse, than the USA, or any other nation of the earth. For every nation and people of the earth, history and culture amount to a mixed bag, with shameful deeds alongside moments of glory; men and women who would be better forgotten, and those whose names should live forever.
A certain indescribable freedom was lost when Old Dixie went down. I have felt the evanescent spirit of it lingering among gatherings of my older relatives, and in conversation with neighbors and co-workers “back home,” especially the more backward and uneducated among them. I have tasted it in the moonshine at my uncle's funeral, and in my mother's corn bread and beans, made just the way her mother, and her mother's mother, made it. Some of it can be heard in the old “hillbilly” songs, and to a lesser degree in the bluegrass and country music that descended from them, or in the “shape-note” singing that has survived mostly in the Old South.
The victory by the North was a victory for Yankee capitalism, for centralized government, for the “robber barons” that would follow the war, for the tenement and factory over the hardscrabble hill and delta farms of the South. It was, as well, the emancipation of a people who should never have been enslaved. It was when the United States became a nation. Shelby Foote noted in his three-volume study of the War that before 1860, people would say “the United States are . . . .” After 1865, it became “the United States is . . . .” We are no longer a collection of states, but one nation, and I am glad of it.
I came to better appreciate the men who fought to save the Union by reading Walt Whitman, and from a courthouse monument in northern New York. The men from that little town and the countryside around it were among the men who were behind that stone wall across the field from my people on that July afternoon. One can read it there on the monument, where the names of battles were engraved. Almost from beginning to end, these men of the Army of the Potomac were badly led, driven off battlefield after battlefield, or sent to their deaths in ill-conceived assaults that should never have been attempted. One can read of those horrors graven on the monument in names such as “Fredericksburg... Chancellorsville... Cold Harbor....” Yet, they persevered, and almost in spite of their commanders, won the war.
And above all, there was Abraham Lincoln.
But my heart will always be in the South. I will always revere Robert E. Lee, Thomas Jackson, J.E.B. Stuart, James Longstreet, A. P. Hill, Dick Ewell, “Allegheny” Johnson, Albert Sidney Johnston, Patrick Cleburne, Bedford Forrest, William Lamb, Raphael Semmes, Jefferson Davis and his cabinet, and many others who were faithful in their duties to home and country. I will try to live up to their example. But it is not only leaders such as these, the ones whose names are in the histories, whose example I emulate....
In the South, there was no money for monuments after the War. Confederate monuments are almost always smaller than those in the towns across the North. The one in the county next over from where I grew up is smaller even than most. It can be found behind an old church on the edge of the little town that is the county seat, and dates from about 1910, when the people of the county finally scraped up enough money to hire a local stonecarver to make it. It is a boy, a teenager, in slouch hat and ragged clothes, barefoot, musket in hand. He looks across the field to the hills that he doubtless loved, and perhaps never saw again after he marched off to the war. I will try, as well, to live up to his example, and the example of those home-guard militiamen buried on the hill near my home, stubbornly persevering in duty and love of country even in defeat.
Inscribed on the monument is just one sentence, a quote from Lee: "There is a true glory and a true honor: the glory of duty done -- the honor of integrity of principle."
In my recent travels (June 2018) I visited the Confederate memorial in the town of my boyhood, said prayers, and left some flowers. It remains well-tended in a time when such things have fallen into disrepute among many.
Here is a photograph of the monument in a neighboring county described above, the barefoot teenager looking across the green fields to the hills. The photo is from this website:
It's all now you see.... For every southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and ... yet it's going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn't need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time. [William Faulkner, from “Intruder in the Dust”]
When I was a lad, I often visited the graveyard near home, especially the lichen-covered stone marker set flat in the ground in one corner at the highest point of the yard. In worn letters, it recorded the names of the Confederate home-guard militia soldiers who died on that hilltop, defending their home town in 1862. (There is now a fine modern monument, erected a few years ago by the Sons of the Confederacy. I left some flowers on it the last time I was there.) It was just a skirmish, not worthy of being called a battle, and the handful of boys and old men who fought there were not even soldiers of the regular Army. Their opponents in blue were indeed “real” soldiers, a nineteen-year-old future president (McKinley) among them. Despite opposition they could not hope to overcome, the militia men of the community fought as best they could and did their duty as they understood it. I doubt that slavery, or states' rights, or any of the other reasons given in history books for the war, figured in their minds that spring day.
Our county, at that time so sparsely populated and remote that it was considered a “wilderness,” sent eleven companies of men into the Army of Northern Virginia. I have stood on Seminary Ridge at Gettysburg and read the names of these eleven companies where they waited through the artillery bombardment that July morning. I have stood, and wept, beside the statue of General Lee astride Traveller looking across that field, much as he was that day in 1863 as the shattered army streamed back past him, defeated.
One of my friends, an African-American musician serving a historic church in the South, related his victory in getting the Confederate Flag removed from his church. He threatened them with a lawsuit because, he said, the Flag constituted harassment, creating a threatening and unwelcoming workplace. I did not even try to explain; I could not, not in terms that he would understand. Even my wife, who knows me better than anyone, does not understand. Her take: “The war is over. You lost. Get over it.”
I will never get over it.
The legacy of the Confederate States of America is a mixed bag. Yes, slavery was part of it. The racism of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan that followed the war must be counted as part of it. In this, the CSA was no better, and in my opinion no worse, than the USA, or any other nation of the earth. For every nation and people of the earth, history and culture amount to a mixed bag, with shameful deeds alongside moments of glory; men and women who would be better forgotten, and those whose names should live forever.
A certain indescribable freedom was lost when Old Dixie went down. I have felt the evanescent spirit of it lingering among gatherings of my older relatives, and in conversation with neighbors and co-workers “back home,” especially the more backward and uneducated among them. I have tasted it in the moonshine at my uncle's funeral, and in my mother's corn bread and beans, made just the way her mother, and her mother's mother, made it. Some of it can be heard in the old “hillbilly” songs, and to a lesser degree in the bluegrass and country music that descended from them, or in the “shape-note” singing that has survived mostly in the Old South.
The victory by the North was a victory for Yankee capitalism, for centralized government, for the “robber barons” that would follow the war, for the tenement and factory over the hardscrabble hill and delta farms of the South. It was, as well, the emancipation of a people who should never have been enslaved. It was when the United States became a nation. Shelby Foote noted in his three-volume study of the War that before 1860, people would say “the United States are . . . .” After 1865, it became “the United States is . . . .” We are no longer a collection of states, but one nation, and I am glad of it.
I came to better appreciate the men who fought to save the Union by reading Walt Whitman, and from a courthouse monument in northern New York. The men from that little town and the countryside around it were among the men who were behind that stone wall across the field from my people on that July afternoon. One can read it there on the monument, where the names of battles were engraved. Almost from beginning to end, these men of the Army of the Potomac were badly led, driven off battlefield after battlefield, or sent to their deaths in ill-conceived assaults that should never have been attempted. One can read of those horrors graven on the monument in names such as “Fredericksburg... Chancellorsville... Cold Harbor....” Yet, they persevered, and almost in spite of their commanders, won the war.
And above all, there was Abraham Lincoln.
But my heart will always be in the South. I will always revere Robert E. Lee, Thomas Jackson, J.E.B. Stuart, James Longstreet, A. P. Hill, Dick Ewell, “Allegheny” Johnson, Albert Sidney Johnston, Patrick Cleburne, Bedford Forrest, William Lamb, Raphael Semmes, Jefferson Davis and his cabinet, and many others who were faithful in their duties to home and country. I will try to live up to their example. But it is not only leaders such as these, the ones whose names are in the histories, whose example I emulate....
In the South, there was no money for monuments after the War. Confederate monuments are almost always smaller than those in the towns across the North. The one in the county next over from where I grew up is smaller even than most. It can be found behind an old church on the edge of the little town that is the county seat, and dates from about 1910, when the people of the county finally scraped up enough money to hire a local stonecarver to make it. It is a boy, a teenager, in slouch hat and ragged clothes, barefoot, musket in hand. He looks across the field to the hills that he doubtless loved, and perhaps never saw again after he marched off to the war. I will try, as well, to live up to his example, and the example of those home-guard militiamen buried on the hill near my home, stubbornly persevering in duty and love of country even in defeat.
Inscribed on the monument is just one sentence, a quote from Lee: "There is a true glory and a true honor: the glory of duty done -- the honor of integrity of principle."
Northern politicians will not appreciate the determination and pluck of the South, and Southern politicians do not appreciate the numbers, resources, and patient perseverance of the North. Both sides forget that we are all Americans. I foresee that our country will pass through a terrible ordeal, a necessary expiation, perhaps, for our national sins....----------------
The truth is this: The march of Providence is so slow and our desires so impatient; the work of progress is so immense and our means of aiding it so feeble; the life of humanity is so long, that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing wave and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope. - Robert E. Lee
In my recent travels (June 2018) I visited the Confederate memorial in the town of my boyhood, said prayers, and left some flowers. It remains well-tended in a time when such things have fallen into disrepute among many.
Here is a photograph of the monument in a neighboring county described above, the barefoot teenager looking across the green fields to the hills. The photo is from this website:
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