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
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.
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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".
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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).