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Home , Ralph Waldo Emerson

“A good fruit of the day's philosophy would be some analysis of the various applications of the infinite soul to aesthetics, to metaphysics, to ethics, to physics, and so show… the present movement in the American mind.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journal, 6/13/1838

Daniel McKanan Senior Lecturer in Divinity Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Cambridge, MA, USA

Dear Daniel,

I’m glad to pick up our thread with respect to the review you were invited to write, alongside that of Bob Richardson and other kindred spirits, for Claire’s extra-ordinary testament, “And The Night Is Spangled With Fresh Stars: A Story of Eternal Love”

The testament takes up Emerson’s recognition that our disciplines today, without that primary faculty of intuition, become but tuitions — in service, indeed, to the dictates of the “bottom-line,” the “Almighty Dollar.”

More I believe is asked of us, if we, humanity, are to have a future worth envisioning for our children, grandchildren, and the generations to come: All Our Relations.

I address you, Daniel, as the Harvard Divinity School, Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Senior Lecturer in Divinity. A formidable title, emblazoned in the Crimson heavens themselves!

Through you and through this testament I address, no less, the Harvard Divinity School, , The Unitarian-Universalist Association, American Religion and Academia “to boot” — on behalf not only of , the subject of this testament, but of his neighbor and kindred spirit, Ralph Waldo Emerson — on behalf of Concord, itself.

~ ~ ~

1 By way of introduction, and as a backdrop to this letter, I write, Daniel, as a native son of Concord/Musketaquid, the home of Waban and the spirited “Praying Indians,” America’s first non-native, inland community, and the crucible of our American , from whence was fired the “shot heard ‘round the world.” I write thereto as the founder and director of The Center for American Studies at Concord, an “uncommon school” in the words of Henry David Thoreau.

The lesser known Concordian, Thomas Whitney Surette, who played the organ at Emerson’s funeral, took up the torch of this “uncommon school” and, kindling the holy flame of the heart, transformed what had been a literary and philosophical impulse into a musical impulse.

Beginning in 1915 and continuing for 23 years “the music of the spheres” resounded through “The Concord Summer School of Music — for those with ears to hear. Of this musically inspired 20th incarnation of Concord’s “village university,” Surette noted: “This is not a normal school."

The chief purpose of this school,” Thomas Whitney went on to say, “is to develop the individuality of teachers [and students] by bringing them in contact with great music, etc., by dealing as clearly as possible with the principle underlying all teaching, and particularly the teaching of music, and to stimulate and help the teacher [and student] to work out his or her own way of teaching. Teaching is an art, not a science. To impose a rigid system on the teaching of any art is to destroy the art and the teacher.

Quoting Robert Hutchins, the President of the University of Chicago and the inspiration behind its “ Program,” Surette goes on; the perspective he offers is nothing more/less than — can one say? — common sense?

“The purpose of higher is to unsettle the lives of young men and women. Try to get a realization of the significance of the life we ourselves must attain to – not just to see objects and events. says that our five senses may shut us out from the world. It is not by looking that we see things, but by seeing. We must use our inner eye…

Try to get a realization of yourself in relation to the world by seeing not only the object but the significance of it. To do this you must have imagination [in-sight] and originality. Interpret the world for yourself. Cultivate a seeing eye, a hearing ear –

2 and be aware. . . . Think for yourself, never through anyone else, be yourself, yet keep within the laws of life.” [emphasis added].

The laws… of life, old friend, not of death.

Surette, as well as Emerson and Thoreau before him, are speaking, one and all, not so much of our feted “critical thinking” but rather, in the Concord spirit, of an empathetic thinking — a thinking that recognizes, and duly acknowledges, the sources from whence it draws.

Speaking to this little recognized fact of life, our modern lives, Henry David Thoreau stated, “How can I understand the rock unless I can soften toward it.” These words are from the same man who had written in his journal on April 11, 1852: “I ask to be melted. You can only ask of the metals that they be tender to the fire that melts them. To nought else can they be tender.”

I speak, Daniel, of Emerson’s, Thoreau’s, Surette’s and — can one say? — of our “calling” to lend whatever hands we are able toward contributing to “the healing of the intellect.” At long last; while we still can. I trust you are familiar with Einstein’s words on this very account:

“We must never relax our efforts to arouse in the people of the world, and especially in their , an awareness of the unprecedented disaster, which they are absolutely certain to bring on themselves, unless there is a fundamental change in their attitude toward one another as well as in their concept of the future. The splitting of the atom has changed everything, save our mode of thinking and thus we drift toward an unparalleled catastrophe... We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.”

In the Concord Spirit, I take up the torch in this Passion-Tide from those Concordians noted, as well as from those who went before them, Concord’s (including Joseph Hosmer and Daniel Bliss) and its original settlers, led by Peter Bulkeley and Simon Willard. This offering would speak, old friend, friends, to the rebirth, the renaissance of thinking and, thus, of culture and, thus, of civilization itself. I speak of a living thinking, borne on the wings of compassion, com-passion, a suffering-with “every thing to which we turn our thoughts, the creation itself, which we have reduced (in our brains/“computers,” Ex Machina) to a THING that “moaneth and travaileth waiting upon man.”

3 “I, Eye, Aye!” Emerson responded in turn. These seven letters, comprising 3 words — each word the same in sound, intonation — summed up the life philosophy of “The Sage of Concord.” When, that is, we come to ourself, our-self, our Self (I), we behold (Eye). And when we behold, are we not filled with wonder (Aye)!

Can one say?

“I have met few men who have a genius for Christianity,” stated Thoreau, affirmed Emerson. They went on to note words that can be scarcely uttered in our day and age when, ironically, critically thinking itself abounds/rebounds.

“It is wonderful, wonderful, the unceasing demand that Christendom makes on you that you speak from a moral point of view. Though you be a babe, the cry is, Repent, repent…”

And yet, if these kindred spirits could utter such a “heresy” in their day (Dec. 20, 1851), when, in the words of Harpers Magazine, “the genius of materialism is getting so strong a hold everywhere…” if these Concord authors could give voice to such a “unceasing demand,” are we not called to allow such words to resound in our time?

The Harper’s quote goes on: “It is interesting to find that the Concord School reasserts with breadth and penetration the supremacy of mind…” [Mind not brain; indeed, are we destroying the former while we are developing the latter?]

The “Dean” of the Concord School of Philosophy spoke to the source of just such “breadth and penetration” in his 1879 inaugural words for “The Concord School,” as reported by a editor from Journal.

“Mr. Alcott, whose 10 lectures are to be on ‘Christian Theism’ then began in earnest the work of the summer by asking, ‘What is expressed by each one of us, so far as we can explore our consciousness, when we say, ‘I, myself’?”

Can we, friend, friends explore our consciousness with such earnestness?

I commend to you, Daniel, the following “offering” that takes up Emerson’s “Divinity School” and “American Scholar” addresses, for which Henry David himself served as an inspiration? Indeed, do those who trace the letters of the words back to their in-forming Spirit doubt that the sources from whence Henry David and Ralph Waldo draw are one and the same?

4 May this offering, and the words that follow, kindle the reverberations of Concord’s celebrated “shot heard ‘round the world”… while, as Yeats envisions, we still can.

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

~ ~ ~

Where to begin, Daniel, take up the thread?

Though the chair in which you sit is, indeed, Emersonian, I trust you are familiar with the opening paragraphs of his old friend, Henry David Thoreau’s perennial best-seller “ or a Life in the Woods.” A true starting point…?

5 “In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my . Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives.” [Emphasis added]

As I turn my thoughts to this letter, the exchange between Emerson and Thoreau comes to mind about that institution from which they graduated and which has offered you your employ — if Ralph Waldo’s and Henry David’s heart-to-heart is not too apocryphal. As I recall, Waldo spoke of Harvard’s many branches of learning to which Henry inquired about the roots. Were they deep, substantial, truly radical/radicalis. Build your castles in the air… Did they reach down to the depths, the fundament?

May this offering serve such an aspiration, old friend.

As you know, the “Sage of Concord” bequeathed to Harvard not only his celebrated American Scholar Address — in the words of Oliver Wendall Holmes, “America’s Intellectual Declaration of Independence” — in which Emerson not only bemoaned but sought to inspire those of singular pursuit within Harvard and academia itself, but I trust that you in particular are aware, Daniel, of Emerson's .

The opening passage of that address to your school and its erstwhile scholars, who gathered on that memorable Sunday Evening, , 1838, follows — along with further glimmers from the address that caught the clear eye of the author of this testament, as she was glancing over the “Sage’s” offering.

In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life. The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and gold in the tint of flowers. The air is full of birds, and sweet with the breath of the pine, the balm-of-Gilead, and the new hay. Night brings no gloom to the heart with its welcome shade. Through the transparent darkness the stars pour their almost spiritual rays.

Emerson goes on:

6 But the moment the mind opens, and reveals the laws which traverse the universe, and make things what they are, then shrinks the great world at once into a mere illustration and fable of this mind. What am I? and What is? asks the human spirit with a curiosity new-kindled, but never to be quenched. Behold these outrunning laws, which our imperfect apprehension can see tend this way and that, but not come full circle. Behold these infinite relations, so like, so unlike; many, yet one. I would study, I would know, I would admire forever. These works of thought have been the entertainments of the human spirit in all ages…

The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves. They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance. Thus; in the soul of man there is a justice whose retributions are instant and entire. He who does a good deed, is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed, is by the action itself contracted…

Often unbeknownst to ourselves?

See how this rapid intrinsic energy worketh everywhere, righting wrongs, correcting appearances, and bringing up facts to a harmony with thoughts. Its operation in life, though slow to the senses, is, at last, as sure as in the soul. By it, a man is made the Providence to himself, dispensing good to his goodness, and evil to his sin. Character is always known…

As we are, so we associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus of their own volition, souls proceed into heaven, into hell…

Miracles, prophecy, poetry; the ideal life, the holy life, exist as ancient history merely; they are not in the belief, nor in the aspiration of ; but, when suggested, seem ridiculous. Life is comic or pitiful, as soon as the high ends of being fade out of sight, and man becomes near-sighted, and can only attend to what addresses the senses…

The true Christianity, -- a faith like Christ's in the infinitude of man, -- is lost. None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed. Ah me! no man goeth alone. All men go in flocks to this saint or that poet, avoiding the God who seeth in secret. They cannot see in secret; they love to be blind in public. They think society wiser than their soul, and know not that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than the whole world.

7 Emerson draws his Divinity School address to its conclusion with (appropriately?) a divination:

I look for the hour when that supreme Beauty, which ravished the souls of those eastern men, and chiefly of those Hebrews, and through their lips spoke oracles to all time, shall speak in the West also. The Hebrew and Greek Scriptures contain immortal sentences, that have been bread of life to millions. But they have no epical integrity; are fragmentary; are not shown in their order to the intellect. I look for the new Teacher, that shall follow so far those shining laws, that he shall see them come full circle; shall see their rounding complete grace; shall see the world to be the mirror of the soul; shall see the identity of the law of gravitation with purity of heart; and shall show that the Ought, that Duty, is one thing with Science, with Beauty, and with Joy.”

Might it be, Daniel, that “The Sage of Concord’s” words are addressed to us — to those with ears, indeed, to hear.

~ ~ ~

As you may be aware, Concord took under its wing during the , providing it with a campus, the “village university,” when yours, Harvard Yard, was occupied by and the Continental Troops.

I trust it hasn’t gone unnoticed by those who have considered this period of our respective histories that concorde means not only , but the name of our town means “with-the-heart” (con-cord). And finally concord bespeaks a New World covenant (concord) — one that is destined to offer the world a Concord Noble Prize for Peace, which addresses, at long last, the essential prerequisites of peace. “That is the uncommon school we want,” Henry David Thoreau went on to note. “Instead of noblemen, let us have noble village of men” and women!

Word has it that Harvard College, led by its president and ardent patriot, Samuel Langdon, along with a good 10 faculty members, and 143 students (some of the lads, 15 years of age, still wet behind the ears) made the exodus out to the “plantation” of Concord. The college’s state-of-the-art clock set the pace and its blustery fire engine brought up the rear.

Should one be surprised, Daniel at such a spirited collaboration between our institutions, the “village” and “urban” universities, the visible and invisible universities?

8 Does that aspiring collaboration not speak to the often searching — if not fitful — relationship between the soul and spirit?

Finally, I write as the grandson of Sinclair Weeks, who — along with serving as a US Senator and Secretary of Commerce under Eisenhower — was not only a rough-riding graduate of Harvard College, but in his more staid years an Overseer of its university. In some crimson Sinclair Weeks is remembered to this day for his “tete-a-tete” with the more liberally minded .

Gathering the foregoing threads, as I write, Daniel, words with which I trust you are familiar quietly resound in the background: “You and I must make a pact; we must bring salvation back. Where there’s love, I’ll be there.”

~ ~ ~

So what, Daniel, is the purpose of this note, this tiding and the accompanying testament:

AND THE NIGHT IS SPANGLED WITH FRESH STARS

A STORY OF ETERNAL LOVE.

Its purpose, as I trust you can appreciate, is a duly extra-ordinary one: to help us remember who we are. The human being, the human being, the human being. Does not our humanity, our essential humanity lie in our striving to become… ever more humane.

Words, and more…?

The Center for American Studies at Concord is not only. as Thoreau noted, a “village university,” but in both the words and memory of one of our Honorary Trustees, Joseph Weizenbaum, Professor of Computer Sciences at MIT, The Center for American Studies at Concord is also an “Invisible University.” That is, we have devoted ourselves to the three mandates, which (as noted in the postscript to follow) he who Emerson referred to as the “ardent and holy ” gave himself upon embarking upon his studies at Leipzig:

* Live invisibly in the body; * Practice an aesthetic life in the soul; * in spirit.

9 In speaking of Novalis, I speak not merely of the contemporary of Goethe, who has been assigned to the category of a “German Idealist.” I speak of one who, in the mere 29 years that was afforded him in this world, not only encompassed the fields of knowledge of his day, but who journeyed on to other realms. I speak of a veritable seer, a kindred spirit of Emerson, Thoreau, and those who strive to see clearly in the spirit. He whom we know as Novalis, “the new man,” strove to bring together the earth and heavens themselves. A veritable “divine,” Daniel?

In his “Idealism” chapter in , Emerson writes: “When reason,” (not faith, belief, , but reason) “is stimulated to more earnest vision, outlines and surfaces become transparent and no longer seen. Causes and spirits are seen through them.” If we can, indeed, imagine…

The following words, Daniel, are from Novalis’ own testament, Christianity or Europe. If you are not familiar with this offering, I trust it will be of particular interest given your profession. Novalis' testament is as deep as it is encompassing.

The reformation was a sign of its time. It was significant for all Europe, even if it had openly broken forth only in truly free Germany. The good minds of all nations had secretly come of age and in the illusory feeling of their vocation revolted the more sharply against obsolete constraint. The erudite, scholarly class, is by instinct the enemy of the clergy — according to the old order. The scholarly and clerical classes, once they are separated, must war to the death, for they strive for one and the same position.

The separation advanced even further, and the scholarly class gained the more ground the more the history of European humanity approached the age of triumphant scholarship, whereas knowledge and faith entered into more decisive opposition.

Is Novalis’ point clear, old friend? Does he not depict the very drama that we find ourselves in today, as we “speak”? I invite you to read on:

It was to faith that people as a whole looked to find the cause of the general impasse, and this they [the scholarly class] hoped to root out by keen knowledge.

Everywhere the sense for the holy suffered from the manifold persecutions of its various forms, its former personality. The end product of the modern manner of

10 thinking was termed "philosophy", and under that head was reckoned everything that was opposed to the old, hence primarily every objection against religion.

Can it be, Daniel? How much we know; how little, it appears, we understand.

The initial personal hatred of the Bible, was broadened to the Christian faith, and finally of religion in general. Still further, the hatred of religion extended itself quite naturally and consistently to all objects of enthusiasm.

It made imagination and emotion heretical, as well as morality and the love of art, the future and the past. With some difficulty it placed man first in the order of created things, and reduced the infinite creative music of the universe to the monotonous clatter of a monstrous mill, which, driven by the stream of chance and floating thereon, was supposed to be a mill in the abstract, with "Builder" or "Miller", in fact an actual perpetuum mobile, a mill that milled of itself.

“The ardent and holy Novalis,” such words bespoke Emerson’s attempt to grasp the spirit of this god-father, I do believe, of humanity.

~ ~ ~

I return t0 the question: What is the purpose of this letter and the testament within which it is enfolded?

Its purpose, as expressed, is an extra-ordinary one: to kindle the holy flame of the heart of humanity.

That is, seeking to catch up with not only Henry David and Ralph Waldo, but with old Ben (Franklin) himself, The Center for American Studies at Concord offers itself as an off-campus laboratory — for kindred spirits within the academic and religious worlds — for the forging not so much of a physical, natural, social, and cognitive science, but for the revelation of a fully-realized spiritual science or science of the spirit.

Such a discipline, “empirical metaphysics,” can be best understood in the tradition of America’s , as given voice by MIT’s George Howison and America’s second Commissioner of Education, William Torrey Harris in the words: “a science of reason.” Emerson and Thoreau spoke more simply of a reasoned faith and a faithful reason.

11 More simply expressed still, I would propose that we are talking about an illumined common sense — as “The Sage of Concord” presents this “calling” in the middle chapter of his 1870 and 1871 lectures from his seminal science of the spirit, “The Natural History of the Intellect.” Following the chapters entitled “Imagination” and “Inspiration,” the “Sage of Concord” goes on to speak not of Intuition but here on our shores of such “Common Sense” — that sense, 6th, 7th… 11th, 12th, that is common to us all, We the People.

Harvard’s spoke, compellingly, to this “promise.” As a member of The Center for American Studies Honorary Circle of Trustees, Stanley grasped the vision of an off-campus laboratory, an incubator that, in both the town and spirit of Concord, is committed to cultivating this fully-realized science of the spirit.

Cavell’s words are also taken up and more fully elaborated in the concluding post script to this testament.

"This is a most happy occasion for me,” Stanley noted in his 1986 Iona College Address, “and I do not wish to mar it by speaking of unhappy things. But I will not belittle it by speaking of anything less than what matters most to me as a teacher and a writer and a citizen. One of these matters I share in common with every thinking person on earth, the imagination, or the refusal of imagination, of nuclear war, the most famous issue now before the world.

Another matter is, in comparison, one of the most obscure issues of the world, and I share it, at most, with a few other obscure persons: the inability of our American culture to listen to the words, to possess them in common, of one of the founding thinkers of our culture, Ralph Waldo Emerson, an inability which presents itself to me as our refusal to listen to ourselves, to our own best thoughts…

~ ~ ~

Repent, repent…The Christian world will not admit that a man has a just perception of any truth, unless at the same time he cries, ‘Lord be merciful to me a sinner’.” ~ Henry David Thoreau, Journal of Dec. 20, 1851

Well, Dan, you and I, each in our own ways, know academia and the religious worlds well enough to know that not only in Emerson’s and Thoreau’s days but in ours such more “transcendental” revelations are not always welcome, nor appreciated, by adherents of these “confessions.” I refer to those, specifically, who have forgotten that

12 their labors are part and parcel of the greater cultural sphere; and that the cultural sphere, in turn — if it is to be truly cultured? — is an expression, as Novalis notes, of the “holy,” the spirit itself.

By spirit, I speak of that aspiration which lifts our merely personal, subjective pursuits to their more universal revelation. In our land, an “aspect” of that spirit, can, I believe, be glimpsed in the countenance of Lady herself, who the young, negro, slave poetess Phillis Wheatley commended to General George Washington in Harvard’s “yard.”

Celestial choir! enthron'd in realms of light, Columbia's scenes of glorious toils I write…

Otherwise expressed, Daniel, such considerations are not appreciated by those clergy and scholars, who, in their focus on “critical thinking,” have forgotten that there may be a deeper wisdom to the shared etymological root of the words think and thank/denken and danken in German. In Thoreau’s words:

“Wisdom does not inspect but behold… We must look a long time before we can see. He has something demonical in him, who can discern a law or couple two facts.”

Henry David is speaking, I believe, of the call for the healing of the intellect. He is speaking — can one say, old friend? — to “the genius of Christianity.”

Integral to such a fully-realized science of the spirit is the revelation that thinking isn’t, in truth, merely a cerebral activity (“mental masturbation” in the vernacular). Rather, as each and every one of us can experience in our most illumined moments, our aspiring heart and devoted will, our whole being asks to be engaged in the act of thinking. When this recognition is grasped, it will become clear that what food is for the body, feelings are for the soul?

That is, if we feed our body stones instead of bread, it will cease to function. So it is with the human soul, our soul. When nourished with finer qualities, sensibilities, feelings of reverence, respect, and devotion, our thinking becomes healthy, vibrant, and ever more fully comprehending. Disrespect, antipathy, skepticism, and the patent disregard of these more human sensibilities — the tell-tale sign of our age? — paralyzes and stunts our thinking process.

13 Emerson and Thoreau — long lost/newly found brothers — would inspire us, those with ears to hear, to devote ourselves to the healing of the intellect, the healing of our modern day and age… out of the self-reliant forces of the “I,” I am.

The man in whose chair you sit, Daniel, Ralph Waldo Emerson himself, gathered up the the strands of the thread that weave on into this testament in his “Self Reliance”:

"The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we inquire the reason of self-trust. Who is the Trustee? What is the aboriginal Self on which a universal reliance may be grounded? What is the nature and power of that science- baffling star, without parallax, without calculable elements, which shoots a ray of beauty even into trivial and impure actions, if the least mark of independence appear? The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct. We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are tuitions.”

Can it be, friend, friends?

Is it not time that those with eyes to see, ears to hear, and a goodly will give back? Is it not time for us — mortals mere — to offer up our best thoughts to those ever near and dear. Is the time not at hand to give voice to what Goethe spoke of as the “manifest secret, the manifest secret, the manifest secret?” To inaugurate what on March 29, 1869 the “Sage of Concord” envisioned as a reverses cultus, a labor of love, mortal/immortal:

“Alcott came and talked and , extolling them with gravity. I bore it long, and then said that was a song for others, not for him….I told him to shut his eyes and let his thoughts run into reverie or whithersoever—and then take an observation. He would find that the current went outward from man, not to man, Consciousness was up stream.”

Is the time not at hand, old friend?

Pray tell, Daniel, from your lion’s den, on behalf — as the spirit moves you — of Harvard’s Divinity School and University, the Unitarian Universalist Association, American Academia and Divines… on behalf of the “Sage” and sages of Concord themselves:

14 In an altered age we worship the dead forms of our forefathers. The world holds onto a formal Christianity, and nobody dares to talk about the heart of Christianity for fear of shocking. ^

Stuart-Sinclair Weeks, Founder The Center for American Studies at Concord

On behalf of the Center’s Concordium, including “the [ever- present and illumined] shades of the great and good for company.”

^ This concluding quotation is from Emerson — if my recollection still serves me after more than a half century of turning the pages of his journals, testaments. I welcome a reminder of the source of the “Sage’s” words.

P.S. Glad to hear Daniel that you too may be journeying out to Concord for our July Village University Celebration, as glimpsed in the following invite. A heartfelt welcome to offer your angle of vision on the only thing that really counts — can one say? — when all is said and done?

“Thou I speak with the tongue of men and angels and have not love…”

* * * * *

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