This is the most I've ever written about the Civil War in one stretch which means it's the most I've thought about the Civil War at one stretch and you can see the evolution in my thinking in the writing. I am now at the stage on the evolutionary timeline marked: amazement.
There is no rational explanation for the manner in which the American people conducted the Civil War and then conducted the post-war peace and when rationality fails we are drawn to the irrational.
Combining the words of Nabokov and Holmes it is as if the hearts of the American people are touched by a divine fire, that that fire purified and was Godsent. I use the present tense in the first clause of that last sentence because I hope we are and think we may be.
I am too aware that I have leapt from 1865 to 1913 and leapt over the human, all too human, Reconstruction period with all of its failings. American Reconstruction is what we would expect of mere humans, it is unexceptional, comprehensible through reason, I do leap over that which is capable of human understanding to that which is not.
Civil wars are a dime-a-dozen in human history, they were especially so in the century just past. There is not one of those things in human history that was fought as this one was fought and whose wounds were healed as this one's were.
There is no rational explanation for the manner in which the American people conducted the Civil War and then conducted the post-war peace and when rationality fails we are drawn to the irrational.
Combining the words of Nabokov and Holmes it is as if the hearts of the American people are touched by a divine fire, that that fire purified and was Godsent. I use the present tense in the first clause of that last sentence because I hope we are and think we may be.
I am too aware that I have leapt from 1865 to 1913 and leapt over the human, all too human, Reconstruction period with all of its failings. American Reconstruction is what we would expect of mere humans, it is unexceptional, comprehensible through reason, I do leap over that which is capable of human understanding to that which is not.
Civil wars are a dime-a-dozen in human history, they were especially so in the century just past. There is not one of those things in human history that was fought as this one was fought and whose wounds were healed as this one's were.
