Skip to main content

A Sense Of Hosley

William Hosley’s political preferences cannot be deduced from his multitudinous work-a-day affairs. That is because the past is larger than politics. The state really should get on its knees and thank God for Mr. Hosley, who is to Connecticut what Ansel Adams and Teddy Roosevelt were to national preservation sites. Mr. Hosley is the founder and creator of "Creating Sense of Place For Connecticut," a Facebook community of like-minded preservationists, historians and history buffs.

Preservationists must sometimes tire of being asked and re-asked the question, “Why should anything be preserved?” What has the past to do with me? Am I not a child of the future, a child of incessant change?


William Faulkner answered the question dramatically in his novel Absalom, Absalom, in which Mr. Faulkner retold history in a rather novel (pun intended) way. The book itself shows the hold the past has on the present, and nearly everyone who credits Mr. Faulkner with the aphorism “The past is not over; it is not even past” mistakenly traces the aphorism to that book. Faulkner scholars more properly point to another Faulkner work, Requiem For A Nun, a sequel to yet another novel, Sanctuary.

Faulkner came closest to defining the pull the past has on the present and future when he was asked by a student at the University of Virginia why he wrote long sentences. Here is Mr. Faulkner’s answer:

“Also, to me, no man is himself; he is the sum of his past. There is no such thing really as “was” because the past IS. It is a part of everyman, every woman and every moment. And so a man, a character in a story at any moment of action, is not just himself as he is then. He is all that made him, and the long sentence is an attempt to get his past and possibly his future into the instant in which he does something.”

Men carry their past around inside them precisely in the way Aeneas, the chief figure in Virgil’s Aeneid, carries his father on his shoulders from burning Troy – towards Rome, the shining and as yet featureless future. The past is father to the man. And as a determinant of human action, it is more alive – more causative -- than many other springs of human action. This alone would account or Mr. Hosley’s drive: His sense that place and nature, if not sacred, is at least fatherly. Like Aeneas, we should preserve the past from armies of the night because it has made us what we are, and we owe to it the kind of affection a son owes to his father or a daughter to her mother. In the spirit of Mr. Faulkner, we might say a place is never just a place; it is the wellspring of human action, which occurs at the very center of our being, the place where “was” struggles with and overcomes “is,” an inchoate, featureless dot in time, more a stage of human action than the drama itself. When men and women gaze into the dark well of their own souls and ask themselves the question” Who am I?” they will find, more often than not, that they are has-beens.

Mr. Hosley has worked tirelessly to sell Connecticut to Connecticut and the world. During his tenure at "Creating Sense of Place for Connecticut,” Mr. Hosley has unearthed a goldmine of Connecticut sites that otherwise would have been lost even to nutmeggers who have lived here their entire lives. This kind of selfless activity ought to be acknowledged and praised. In his case, the struggle is its own reward. His endeavor is ambitious: nothing less that the re-presentation of the past to those fortunate few of us who remain in the present.

Generously bestrewing compliments, G. K. Chesterton once said of tradition – by which he meant a living history informed by the past:

“Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father.”

Here is Mr. Hosley warming up to the great love of his life:


Comments

dmoelling said…
I often think of how little most residents of CT know of the long history (starting with why we are the Constitution State). Although I've lived here for close to 40 years, I do not consider my self as being from CT. Perhaps this is because of the predominant leftist and PC drumbeat. But CT was not such a bloodless or ambitionless state. Once a powerhouse of industry, shipping, innovation it is now a shell of its former self. If you read some of the patriotic sermons of the revolutionary war Yankee ministers, you see really extraordinary people. The early Yankee traders sending fast clippers to China, Quaker whaling ship moguls, tobacco tycoons, machinery geniuses and others made the state wealthy, dynamic and exciting. History can instruct but it has been handcuffed by the endless bitching of the Social Justice crowd.
peter brush said…
I don't recall getting much of a Connecticut history curriculum in government elementary school 1961-65. Fifty years later the government has degraded its education service even as it has broadened its application to increasingly "special" recipients. Here in Hartford half the students come from homes without English, and I'll bet a good percentage of them couldn't find the Connecticut River on a map. My Italian mailman, Vinnie, came over here after elementaRY, says that part of an Italian education is comprehensive Italian history. Would that we had Mr. Hosley designing a history curriculum for juvenile Nutmeggers.

As you say, it's not as if this problem is simply a matter of having a bit less data up in the skull hard drive. We don't know who we are, and if you don't know who you are it's a problem; how are you to act? Put otherwise, cultural happiness and integrity take a hit. We'd be alienated if there were anything there at this point to be alienated from. Mr. Moelling has a good word for our condition; bloodless.

The other day a woman called into Bill Bennett's radio show and asked if he'd ever heard of the National Monument to the Forefathers in Plymouth, Ma. He hadn't; nor had I. OK, we are a "nation of immigrants," if you like, but we immigrated into an existing tradition of self-government; a tradition that gets some articulation in our Fundamental Orders. To use Professor Huntington's distinction from "Who We Are," we are, or ought to be, a nation of settlers as well as one of aliens. Look; the Plymouth monument says nothing at all about equality or progress.
----------------
On the main pedestal stands the heroic figure of "Faith" with her right hand pointing toward heaven and her left hand clutching the Bible. Upon the four buttresses also are seated figures emblematical of the principles upon which the Pilgrims founded their Commonwealth; counter-clockwise from the east are Morality, Law, Education, and Liberty. Each was carved from a solid block of granite, posed in the sitting position upon chairs with a high relief on either side of minor characteristics. Under "Morality" stand "Prophet" and "Evangelist"; under "Law" stand "Justice" and "Mercy"; under "Education" are "Youth" and "Wisdom"; and under "Liberty" stand "Tyranny Overthrown" and "Peace". On the face of the buttresses, beneath these figures are high reliefs in marble, representing scenes from Pilgrim history. Under "Morality" is "Embarcation"; under "Law" is "Treaty"; under "Education" is "Compact"; and under "Freedom" is "Landing".
---------------
In Confucian philosophy, filial piety (Chinese: 孝, xiào) is a virtue of respect for one's father, elders, and ancestors. The Confucian classic Xiao Jing or Classic of Xiào, thought to be written around the Qin-Han period, has historically been the authoritative source on the Confucian tenet of xiào / "filial piety". The book, a conversation between Confucius and his student Zeng Shen (曾參, also known as Zengzi 曾子), is about how to set up a good society using the principle of xiào (filial piety).

Popular posts from this blog

The Blumenthal Burisma Connection

Steve Hilton , a Fox News commentator who over the weekend had connected some Burisma corruption dots, had this to say about Connecticut U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal’s association with the tangled knot of corruption in Ukraine: “We cross-referenced the Senate co-sponsors of Ed Markey's Ukraine gas bill with the list of Democrats whom Burisma lobbyist, David Leiter, routinely gave money to and found another one -- one of the most sanctimonious of them all, actually -- Sen. Richard Blumenthal."

Powell, the JI, And Economic literacy

Powell, Pesci Substack The Journal Inquirer (JI), one of the last independent newspapers in Connecticut, is now a part of the Hearst Media chain. Hearst has been growing by leaps and bounds in the state during the last decade. At the same time, many newspapers in Connecticut have shrunk in size, the result, some people seem to think, of ad revenue smaller newspapers have lost to internet sites and a declining newspaper reading public. Surviving papers are now seeking to recover the lost revenue by erecting “pay walls.” Like most besieged businesses, newspapers also are attempting to recoup lost revenue through staff reductions, reductions in the size of the product – both candy bars and newspapers are much smaller than they had been in the past – and sell-offs to larger chains that operate according to the social Darwinian principles of monopolistic “red in tooth and claw” giant corporations. The first principle of the successful mega-firm is: Buy out your predator before he swallows

Down The Rabbit Hole, A Book Review

Down the Rabbit Hole How the Culture of Corrections Encourages Crime by Brent McCall & Michael Liebowitz Available at Amazon Price: $12.95/softcover, 337 pages   “ Down the Rabbit Hole: How the Culture of Corrections Encourages Crime ,” a penological eye-opener, is written by two Connecticut prisoners, Brent McCall and Michael Liebowitz. Their book is an analytical work, not merely a page-turner prison drama, and it provides serious answers to the question: Why is reoffending a more likely outcome than rehabilitation in the wake of a prison sentence? The multiple answers to this central question are not at all obvious. Before picking up the book, the reader would be well advised to shed his preconceptions and also slough off the highly misleading claims of prison officials concerning the efficacy of programs developed by dusty old experts who have never had an honest discussion with a real convict. Some of the experts are more convincing cons than the cons, p