I was trained in the '50s as a New Critic. I remember what literature was like before the New Critics, when people stood up and talked about Shelley's soul and such things.
I once drove a pair of horses from New York to Vicksburg, and to this day I can almost map out that country as I saw it then, with its hills and valleys, villages and rivers. Yes, I naturally attribute something of my success in railroad building to the interest I take in such things.
When you receive national recognition for leading the nation's toughest crackdown on illegal immigration and serving as Donald Trump's Virginia State Chairman, you get used to being falsely labeled as racist and xenophobic by the mainstream media, especially by 'The Washington Post''s editorial board, which has labeled me as such things for years.
The infrastructure of the US is a long-term suspension of disbelief that such things won't be exploded deliberately by people who don't create anything.
I've never bribed my way into a restaurant. I've never slipped a C-note or greased a palm. In truth, I've never even considered it. I've assumed, of course, that people do such things.
A big diamond necklace is nouveau riche, really. People who have wealth a long time don't wear such things.
I am well aware that many will say that no one can possibly speak with spirits and angels so long as he lives in the body; and many will say that it is all fancy, others that I relate such things in order to gain credence, and others will make other objections.
The sharecropper may lower his eyes, but not because he's less of a man. That's just a condition of society that such things exist.
The pure air and dazzling snow belong to things beyond the reach of all personal feeling, almost beyond the reach of life. Yet such things are a part of our life, neither the least noble nor the most terrible.
There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.
