​One of my early discoveries in French poetry was a well-known sonnet by Joachim du Bellay. “Heureux qui comme Ulysse” was written in the mid-16th century during the poet's extended visit to Rome and published in 1558 in his collection Regrets. Du Bellay was a founder of the Pléiade movement; its best-known member is Ronsard.  

Happy Was Ulysses
By Joachim du Bellay

Happy the Ulysses who finished his voyage,
happy the man who seized the fleece, and
came back home, wiser and experienced,
to live among his people into old age.

When will I, alas, in my little village
again see the smoking chimney, in which season
see again the espaliered trees of my garden,
to me a province and peaceful anchorage?

I prefer the dwelling my ancestors raised
to Roman palaces’ audacious fronts;
I like the marble less than the thin slate,

my Liré more than Tiber’s Latin flow,
the hills of home over the Palatine mount,
sea air less than the sweetness of Anjou.  

The last two lines of the second stanza are more gloss than translation. The poem is available online with a very loose 19th-century translation into French and an audio file with a recitation in French.

Heureux qui comme Ulysse
By Joachim du Bellay
 
Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage,
Ou comme cestuy-là qui conquit la toison,
Et puis est retourné, plein d’usage et raison,
Vivre entre ses parents le reste de son âge !
 
Quand reverrai-je, hélas, de mon petit village
Fumer la cheminée, et en quelle saison
Reverrai-je le clos de ma pauvre maison,
Qui m’est une province, et beaucoup davantage ?
 
Plus me plaît le séjour qu’ont bâti mes aïeux,
Que des palais Romains le front audacieux,
Plus que le marbre dur me plaît l’ardoise fine :
 
Plus mon Loire gaulois, que le Tibre latin,
Plus mon petit Liré, que le mont Palatin,
Et plus que l’air marin la doulceur angevine.


Posted 27 March 2026, edited 28 March 2026

The Kinkajou, or the Honey Bear
Loosely based on the poem by Jacques Roubaud (how loosely, I don’t recall)

Von Humboldt, smarter than me or you,
had for pal a kinkajou
so adorable and sleek
he kissed it on the cheek.

The honey bear would run
his long extrudable tongue
through the linguist’s beard
(to linguists no tongue is weird).

You’d have to pay a pretty sou
to find anything stranger
than the love of the explorer
for his little kinkajou.

Nor could anyone top
those two marvels of creation,
his female cocks of the rock,
pride of von Humboldt’s collection.

But one day the kinkajou
received a message in a
wire from Louisiana
concise as peanut or cashew

sent by his aging maman:
‘Come home, my dearest, due
to passing of ton papa,
king of the kinkajou.’

Von Humboldt got mad as the dickens
when, with surprising ease,
his darling murdered the chickens
and stuffed them in a valise.

The moral of this plot
is that the kinkajou’s not
a bear at all. No bear would ever
take the simple measure
of packing its provisions.
That isn’t in its nature. 

I’ve posted at least once before on Jacques Roubaud’s marvelous poems for children, Les animaux de personne. The poems use nonsense, onomatopoeia, fractured fairy tales, and a lot of silliness and play to delight and entertain. I don’t know whether the famous naturalist Alexander von Humboldt had a pet kinkajou, but it’s not out of the question: he explored widely and kinkajous have been adopted as pets.

I imagine the young Roubaud in his grandparents’ library exploring 19th-century folio encyclopedias of world animals. As he poured over the detailed engravings of beasts, I imagine he was enthralled by their strange names as much as by their unfamiliar shapes.

I wrote this adaptation of Roubaud’s poem several years ago and recently revised it.

​Gustave Doré (1832 - 1883), The Fables of La Fontaine: Death and the Woodcutter. Between 1866 and 1868, Doré created 300 illustrations of Fables published in sixty parts.

​Death and the Woodcutter
by Jean de la Fontaine

A poor woodcutter, covered with twigs and leaves,
Under the weight of his bundle of wood and years
Trembling and bent, was walking with heavy feet
Trying to make it to his smoky hut.
Exhausted, in too much pain to go on,
Thinking of misery, he lays his burden down.
Since he’s been in the world, what pleasure has he seen?
Is there anyone worse off in the round machine?
Sometimes no bread at all, never a rest,
His wife, his children, the soldiers, taxes,
His creditors and impressed labor—
Of every misfortune, he’s the very picture!
He calls Death. It does not tarry.
It asks him what must be done.
He says, if you could only help me
Reload this wood—it’ll take you just a second.

Death heals all—that’s no surprise.
But let’s not budge from where we stand:
Better to suffer than die,
That’s the wisdom of man.
 
I’ve thought about translating this poem for a long time, but I wrote this first draft on Saturday, 7 Feb 2026. Excluding the last four lines, it’s sort of story my father or my first father-in-law might have told. The switch from past to present tense in the first stanza is in the original.
 
La Mort et le Bûcheron
Jean de La Fontaine
 
Un pauvre Bûcheron, tout couvert de ramée,
Sous le faix du fagot aussi bien que des ans
Gémissant et courbé, marchait à pas pesants,
Et tâchait de gagner sa chaumine enfumée.
Enfin, n’en pouvant plus d’effort et de douleur,
Il met bas son fagot, il songe à son malheur,
Quel plaisir a-t-il eu depuis qu’il est au monde ?
En est-il un plus pauvre en la machine ronde ?
Point de pain quelquefois, et jamais de repos.
Sa femme, ses enfants, les soldats, les impôts,
Le créancier et la corvée
Lui font d’un malheureux la peinture achevée.
Il appelle la Mort. Elle vient sans tarder,
Lui demander ce qu’il faut faire.
« C’est, dit-il, afin de m’aider
À recharger ce bois ; tu ne tarderas guère. »
 
Le trépas vient tout guérir ;
Mais ne bougeons d’où nous sommes :
Plutôt souffrir que mourir,
C’est la devise des hommes.
 
According to the Graphic Arts Collection at Princeton Library, La Fontaine’s Fables has been popular since its first publication in the last third of the 17th century (1668 – 1694): “Princeton University Library lists 696 versions of the Fables of Jean de La Fontaine (1621-1695) dating from 1668 to 2018 in twenty identified languages, including both paper and online, audio, manuscript, visual, projected, and a senior thesis.” 

George Chinnery (1774 - 1852), A Man Carrying Faggots, Google Art Project. 

Anonymous, in public domain 

The writer of Hebrews 13:2 advises, “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” In this delightful poem (the eighth in the sequence « Tendres Impôts à la France » - “Tender Taxes to France”), Rilke advises us on how to act when we knowingly serve a meal to an angel. It turns out the angel is an ouvrier—a member of the working class, albeit the celestial working class—and he will model his behavior at the table by imitating the host. And what work have we commissioned? The last line reveals it.
 
8 [Reste tranquille si soudain]
by Rainer Maria Rilke

Stay calm if at your table
the Angel has suddenly decided;
quietly smooth the few wrinkles
in the tablecloth under your bread.

You will offer your food, though coarse, 
so that he in turn may taste,
that to his pure lips he may raise
a simple, everyday glass.

Artlessly, like a celestial worker,
to everything he brings a calm focus;
he eats well, mimicking your gesture,
that he may build well your house.


Original:

Reste tranquille si soudain
l’Ange à ta table se décide ;
efface doucement les quelques rides
que fait la nappe sous ton pain.

Tu offriras ta rude nourriture
pour qu’il en goute à son tour,
et qu’il soulève à sa lèvre pure
un simple verre de tous les jours.

Ingénument, en ouvrier céleste,
il prête à tout une calme attention ;
Il mange bien en imitant ton geste,
pour bien bâtir à ta maison.

​Roads in the so-called Lost Provinces in 1936. You will note that state highways 113 and 93, mentioned in the post, do not yet exist. 113 probably replaced the unimproved road (light blue dots) that led from Laurel Springs and crossed US 221 near Scottville. When the roads were regraded and paved, the road from that point to the Virginia line was designated highway 93.
Highway 16, from the crest of the Blue Ridge to Wilkesboro, is shown as a gravel road. County maps from this year show it as paved. The inconsistency suggests that this stretch of road was paved in that year.
Source: NC State Highway Map, 1936. Website: Digitized Historical Maps: Georeferenced Historical NC Maps. The repository of this map is the North Carolina State Archives.

​My parents were born in Ashe and Alleghany counties, two adjoining counties in the northwest corner of North Carolina. By the time I was aware of my grandparents—my father’s parents and my mother’s mother (her father had been killed in 1938)—they lived near each other on Federal highway 221 and ran country stores. “Federal highway” sounds grand, but it was a winding, narrow road, noticeably crown shaped, with narrow shoulders. In my small world, it was the road that connected three significant places: Sparta, the county seat of Alleghany County; Scottville, the unincorporated community straddling Alleghany and Ashe where my grandparents lived on the Alleghany side; and Jefferson, county seat of Ashe County, where my family would live for roughly 18 months when I was in the fifth and sixth grades. Between Sparta and Scottville was the turnoff to a road (unpaved when I was a child) that led to my paternal grandfather’s cattle farm, tobacco allotment, and strawberry patches, and beyond to Peach Bottom Mountain. 

​My paternal grandfather Elbert (far right; 1901 – 1972, K63B-274 [1]), his sons, and one grandson at the old Duncan Place on highway 113 just northwest of its intersection with 221. This picture was taken around the time of the Korean War. My father is in the middle wearing a dark shirt and light trousers.

My maternal grandmother was Anyce (1897 –1990, K46N-3JD); in her later years everyone called her Mama Shepherd. Her store was separated from 221 by two gas pumps (she sold Shell gas) and a space alongside the highway just wide enough for a car safely to park to buy gas. Once, in a management training program, I was mentored by a retired executive from the petroleum industry. He said his claim to fame was the invention of the self-service gas station. I replied that my grandmother had invented it long before him.

“If you want gas, pump it yourself” she told new customers who stopped to gas up; her regulars didn’t have to be told. She sat in a recliner in a small living room just off the equally small storeroom. Aside from the recliner, there were a small couch, tables with begonias and violets and a table clock, and on the wall the pictures of her patron saints—FDR, her late husband Charlie (murdered in 1938), and superimposed profiles of the slain Kennedy brothers that had been pulled from an issue of Look Magazine and framed. When regular customers who had filled up came in to pay, she often told them to put the money on the counter. (This was a long time before you could pay at the pump.) She allowed the most trusted customers to make change from her cash box.

The store my father’s parents ran was bigger than Anyce’s and sold a wider variety of goods. In addition to the canned goods, sodas, and snack foods my grandmother stocked, they sold engine belts, salt blocks for cattle, sacks of feed, denim outerwear. The stock was delivered by truck, of course, over the two-lane highways. Mom turned 5 shortly after her father was killed; she befriended many of the delivery men. She once gave the Dr Pepper man a puppy, and in return he gave her a free soda every week.

Near Anyce’s store NC highway 113 crosses 221 and runs north till it merges with NC 93 and continues across the New River in Mouth of Wilson, Virginia. Till I was 11, we lived in Marion, Virginia, but came to visit the grandparents virtually every weekend. I became intimately familiar with 113 and with Virginia highway 16 which connected Mouth of Wilson to Marion. Later, when we moved to Jefferson, NC, I learned that Virginia 16 became NC 16 at the state line and provided a direct route from Jefferson to Marion. When we moved to Wilkes County, to visit the grandparents we drove north on NC highway 18 to climb the Blue Ridge; in Laurel Springs, about twelve miles short of Sparta, we turned northwest on our friend NC 113 till we reached its intersection with US 221. This stretch of Highway 18 was, and is, a winding road, with a 270 degree hairpin turn. Daddy said the highway builders chose its course by following a cow on her way up the mountain.

I risk this long account of highways because, having traveled them hundreds of times in my life, they are deeply familiar and hold a place of deep affection. They were there when I came along and I found it natural to imagine they have always been there. But such is not the case. The corner of the state where my parents were born did not get reliable, all-weather roads connecting them to the foothills and piedmont of North Carolina until after 1921, when the State Highway Act became law, in part as a result of lobbying by the Good Roads movement. (Hugh Talmage Lefler and Albert Ray Newsome, North Carolina: The History of a Southern State. Revised Edition, UNC, 1963, 554; see also “Good Roads Movement.”) This was just five years before my father was born.

Until then, the roads connecting the rest of the state to the northwest corner were sketchy at best. In 1915, in his A History of Watauga County, John Preston Arthur, wrote: “The mountain can be easily passed at each of these gaps [in the Blue Ridge escarpment], and, if the roads were good, the inconvenience of crossing the mountain would be disregarded. The roads have been badly laid out; they are badly made, and the population in many parts is too weak to keep the roads in even tolerable repair.”

This essay is about the isolation of the area and how the term “Lost Provinces” came to be applied to it. The obstacles to building good roads connecting the Lost Provinces to the rest of the state were geographic, political, and economic.

Geographic. In 1924, a report issued by the State Ship and Water Transportation Commission stated: “North Carolina is in a tragic condition of being itself dismembered and of having most of the communications of its people north and south instead of east and west, and it has been made as difficult as possible for the people of the east and the people of the west to trade with each other. And thus it is that we have ‘lost provinces’ in the west and ‘lost provinces’ in the east.” (Report of the State Ship and Water Transportation Commission, 1924, 11. ECU Digital Collections)

The roads in the Lost Provinces in 1924. The roads leading down the mountain from Boone and Jefferson to Wilkesboro and from Sparta to Elkin were more trail than road. (Map: Report of the State Ship and Water Transportation Commission.) In this period, as discussed below, young Edwin Duncan would hike from Doughton to Sparta when he returned home from university in Chapel Hill because, for practical purposes, the road didn’t exist. 

​The barrier to movement to the northwest corner was the Blue Ridge escarpment. In the late 18th century, settlers and travelers—many were passing through the North Carolina mountains on the way to settle in Kentucky—discovered that the Blue Ridge could be ascended via narrow passes called gaps. (These gaps include Cook’s Gap, Phillips’ Gap, Deep Gap, Flat Gap, Daniel’s Gap, Reddies River Gap, and Mulberry Gap.) The problem was climbing up to the gaps from the lowland, especially when pulling wagons.

Once the Blue Ridge had been climbed, travelers “found to their surprise that the Blue Ridge was a ridge on the eastern side but not ridge at all on the west. They found themselves standing on the edge of a vast plateau, stretching west, southwest and northwest as far as their eyes could see. Rolling woodlands of fairly uniform height lay before them and from the woodlands rose here and there lofty mountains, four thousand to five thousand feet above sea level” (Arthur Lloyd Fletcher, Ashe County: A History, New Edition, McFarland, 1963, 2006, 61-62).

Before the roads down the mountain were graded and paved, those who lived in the mountains and had goods to buy or sell found it easier to go to the railheads in Johnson City, Tennessee; Marion, Virginia (later Troutdale, around 20 miles closer than Marion); and Galax, Virginia. In 1914, the railroad came to West Jefferson, Ashe County, but it came in from the north (“The Virginia Creeper in West Jefferson”) so still did not provide direct transportation to the rest of the state.  

As of 1890, a spur line from Winston-Salem terminated in North Wilkesboro, but according to the lore of a friend’s family, it took an oxcart a day and a half to drive the forty miles from Jefferson to Wilkesboro, and another day and a half to make the return trip (“North Carolina Railroads - North-Western North Carolina Railroad”). My father told my brother that it took three days to make the round trip to North Wilkesboro from Ashe County with a horse and wagon—one day to get there and two days to go back. Climbing the mountain was hard on the horses. (See the comment section for more.) Traveling to railheads in West Jefferson, Tennessee, and Virginia was easier and less expensive than traveling down the mountain to North Wilkesboro, but only the depot there offered direct passenger and freight service to the piedmont and eastern NC.

Political and Economic. Until the passage of the 1921 law, road building and maintenance were generally left to the counties. They were some exceptions: a turnpike was laboriously built from the Tennessee line in Ashe County to Wilkesboro using private, county, and state funds as well as tolls paid by travelers; it was “a sand-clay road, with improved grades” (Fletcher, 100). It was destroyed in the 1916 flood and then abandoned. The mountain counties were settled too sparsely to provide the manpower needed to build and maintain roads, especially in the demanding terrain of the Blue Ridge front.

(The 1916 flood also destroyed a branch railroad, the Watauga and Yadkin Valley line, that ran 24 miles from North Wilkesboro to Darby. It was built to haul timber out of the foothills. There were plans, likely unrealistic, to continue the line to Boone, about 1,600 feet higher in elevation than Darby and 2,100 feet higher than North Wilkesboro (“No ‘Alleged’ Railroad,” The North Wilkesboro Hustler, 29 July 1913). While he was in his teens, my first father-in-law, Talmadge, took the train to Darby then walked the remaining 20 miles to Boone, so he could attend summer classes at Appalachian Training School (now Appalachian State University) and qualify to teach in the public schools. The W&Y Railroad is still shown on the 1924 map above, but by then it existed only in the form of wrecked locomotives and ruined trestles. By then the dream of building railroads into the mountains had been replaced by ambitions of building all-weather roads.)

Several changes led to the Highway Act of 1921—the formation of the State Highway Commission by the legislature in 1915, the Federal Highway Act of 1916 providing funds to the states “on a matching basis to improve major interstate federal roads,” and state laws enacted in 1917 allowing the State Highway Commission to accept federal funds and to impose automobile license fees (Lefler and Newsome, 554).

Life in a Lost Province

Over the years, I’ve gathered a few stories, from my family and others—illustrating how the folks in the mountain were affected by the isolation and their transportation choices.

Dave and Lou Tisha Grubb. Dave (1870–1957, KN98-77L) and Lou Tisha (1880–1960, KN98-WHH) were my father’s maternal grandparents. Beginning around 1926, they lived near Nathan’s Creek, Ashe County, on a farm still in the family. In 1926, Dave bought the farm from Lou Tisha’s father, John Shepherd (1849 – 1926, LZ8H-XQ2), who died that year. I don’t know how long the farm had been in the family. I understand that the house was built in the 1850s by Barnett V. Idol and, so far as I know, it was already owned by the Shepherd family. (Conversation with Nancy Bare, 11/22/2020)

Great Aunt Maude (1910–1993, L8Q8-65D), my grandmother’s sister, once briefly described life on the farm in the 30s and 40s. Her mother raised wonderful peaches, she told me, clingstone varieties in June and July for pies and sweet pickles, Albertas in August and September for canning. The family milked 10 to 12 cows, and with the milk they fed the hogs, gave skim milk to the neighbors, and made butter, cottage cheese, and some solid cheese. (Conversation with Maude Lowman, 4/1/1979)

As to travel, she mentioned only that her father Dave took wheat, rye, and buckwheat by wagon to be ground by the mill in Mouth of Wilson, Virginia. The trip, about 15 miles mostly by highway 16, now takes fewer than 20 minutes by car, more than five hours on foot. To reach the mill on Wilson Creek, he had to cross the New River by ferry. When I was quite young, the river was still crossed by ferry. I don’t remember the ferry, but I do recall the narrow truss bridge that succeeded it and was not replaced with a modern suspension bridge till well into my adult years.

One of the more dramatic family stories was first told to me by my dad, but my cousin Becky, daughter of John R. Grubb, shared with me a more complete and probably more accurate version in a conversation in June 2018.

In 1920, John R. Grubb (1902–1993, KN98-WKX) rode a horse into church during service. He was 17 and his purpose was to see a young lady at the service. He had called out to her from outside, but she wouldn’t come out to see him—she was sitting by another young man. John rode in to see her. In addition to being filled with the foolishness of youth, he may well have been full of drink, or so my father heard. He got into a fight in the church, and in the melee, someone cut off his necktie just under the knot. He never wore a necktie again.

As my father told it, disturbing the peace inside a church was a serious offence. To avoid his arrest, he said, that night Dave Grubb took his son by horseback to Troutdale, Virginia, where he put him on a train for California. The depot in West Jefferson was only about half as far as Troutdale, but perhaps Dave wanted to get out of the state as soon as possible while avoiding local officers of the law.

Becky’s version is a little less dramatic and more detailed: a day or two after the event (but not the same night), Dave rode with John to the railhead in Troutdale and sent him to West Virginia to stay with family and work in the mines. The mines wouldn't hire him—he was too young—so he moved on to Macallister, Oklahoma, where he also had family. He worked for a couple of years and saved money to take the train to California.[2]

Family already in California helped him find work, and until the Depression John did well working for two men, Mr. Lewis and another man, and I believe he had his own small spread. When the Depression hit, John was married with three children, one of whom suffered from epilepsy. Eventually, his employers could no longer pay their help—poor Mr. Lewis killed himself—and for a while John and his family got by on a barn full of sweet potatoes.

​In the depths of the Depression, around 1938 (I think), John Grubb and his family returned to North Carolina permanently. It took 12 days just to cross Texas, Becky said, with her mother driving (John R. didn't have a license). One reason it took so long was the seizures frequently suffered by one of the daughters: they would stop and camp until she improved. North Carolina had few women drivers, so folks along the road would scatter when they saw Becky’s mother at the wheel.

My father said he was at the Grubb place when John and his family showed up unannounced. It was hard on him; he had become like a son to his grandfather, and now he was displaced by the real son.


Edwin Duncan, Sr. Edwin Duncan, Sr. (1905-1973, K89G-VD4) was born in Sparta, county seat of Alleghany County, in 1905. His father, Crockett (1873–1953, KF58-N16), was a farmer, businessman, and banker, having established the Bank of Sparta in 1902. In 1937, father and son established the Northwestern Bank through merger with another small bank. By the time Edwin Duncan died in 1973, it was the fourth largest bank in the state and had branches as far east as Durham. By then he was one of the leading figures in the western part of the state.

As a young man fresh out of the university, Edwin almost decided to pursue a business career in the more accessible piedmont. In a newspaper profile in 1965, Duncan said, “‘there was no road down the mountain [from Sparta]. The nearest depot was at Galax. We took our trade, such as it was, to that Virginia town.’” According to the profile, when he traveled to the University of North Carolina, “going and coming often involved long hikes up and down the mountain from Doughton to Sparta.” As a result, “he had made up his mind to go to work in the city” in the lowlands.

“‘I was in Winston-Salem looking for work,’ he says, ‘when my daddy soft-talked me into coming home. He told me the state was going to build a paved road up the mountain. He said business at home would improve.’.... This was 1925.” Young Edwin became a cashier in his father’s bank. It was a good decision for him. (Chester Davis, “Banker Ed Duncan Symbol of Northwest N.C. Growth," Winston Salem Journal, 4 April 1965)

The year of Duncan’s decision, 1925, was the year before my father was born. As my memoirs of my father will show, Duncan’s decision to become a mountain banker and the way he conducted business figured significantly in my father’s professional career and in the circumstances leading to his death. 

Edwin Duncan, Sr., in 1965. He was president of the Northwestern Bank from 1958 until his retirement in 1971. (James Smith, “Retired Bank President, Former Senator Dies,” Winston-Salem Journal, 8 Oct 1973)

​Banmon Grayson, known professionally as G.B. Grayson. Mostly blind from an early age, Grayson was an influential fiddle player, singer, and song writer. As a young child, G.B. Grayson “left Ashe County for Laurel Bloomery, Tennessee, a very short move in miles, but one that gave him easier access to the Lee Highway, an important road that connected towns all along the Blue Ridge.” (“Music from the Lost Provinces: Old-Time String Bands from Ashe County, North Carolina, 1927 – 31”)

A verse from Grayson's I've Always Been a Rambler captures the travel habits of folks in the Lost Provinces. They did not look to the prosperous, growing towns of the piedmont:

I left old North Caroliner, to Marion I did go,
Then on to Johnson City, gonna see this wide world o'er.
Where money and work was plentiful and the girls treated me kind,
The only object of my heart was the one I left behind.

(Lyle Lofgren, “Remembering the Old Songs: I'VE ALWAYS BEEN A RAMBLER,” Inside Bluegrass, May 2005. This stanza is included in the performance on YouTube.)

G.B. Grayson
​

Thomas C. “Tam” Bowie. Although difficult, traveling east into piedmont North Carolina was necessary for some. Tam Bowie was a state legislator from Ashe County. He was one of many influential people from the northwest corner of the state who boosted the Good Roads movement in North Carolina in the 1920s; his biography in NCPedia credits him as being a leading promoter of the State Highway Act that “initiate[d] a $50 million road building program in North Carolina” (Thomas S. Morgan, “Bowie, Thomas Contee,” 1979).

When the State Highway Act was being considered, officials and businessmen around the state began organizing campaigns to obtain funds to build and improve roads in their localities. Bowie helped organize and lead the campaign for the Lost Provinces in the seventh highway district. In a campaign meeting held in Wilkesboro in May 1921, he described “the great trouble with Ashe county”: “[H]er outlets are in Virginia and Tennessee and not North Carolina.… [T]he people of the county want to come to Wilkesboro; to reach North Carolina cities and towns now we must travel several hundred miles by rail.” He gave himself as an example: traveling to the meeting from his home in Ashe County, a distance of around forty miles, took two days by train. (“Largely Attended Road Meeting Held at Wilkesboro Yesterday,” Greensboro News and Record, 21 May 1921)

Origin of “The Lost Provinces”

For some time, I have known the counties beyond the Blue Ridge in the northwest corner of the state were the Lost Provinces. So far as I can remember, I assumed the term had been hallowed by time, like the State of Franklin or the Lost Colony. I haven’t heard the term in a good while, possibly because I don’t live there, possibly because the term has disappeared from popular usage. (It persists in journalism and on websites devoted to Ashe County history.) Recently I began to wonder how the term came about and when it was first applied to these counties.

As we’ve seen, each area in the northwest corner of the state looked in a different direction for transportation and trade with the outside. In Alleghany, businessmen and travelers looked to the railhead in Galax, Virginia; in Ashe, they looked to West Jefferson and to Marion, Virginia (and later to Troutdale, Virginia); in Watauga, they looked to Johnson City, Tennessee. The area was, for ordinary business and practical purposes, lost to the rest of the state, so the term made a certain amount of sense.

After running searches in newspapers.com, I’ve concluded that the term likely was popularized as a slogan of the Good Roads campaign in the northwestern counties. In fact, although I cannot yet prove it, I think the campaign likely deserves credit for first applying the term to these remote counties.

Using newspapers.com, I searched “Lost Province(s)” for North Carolina newspapers from 1870 till 1930. Not surprisingly, I found that the term was most often used for the Alsace-Lorraine region, provinces on the border between France and Germany that were annexed by the Germans after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870; they were lost because they had been taken by a hostile country. Until the French regained them as part of the Treaty of Versailles in 1920, they remained a point of friction between the two countries and a frequent source of headlines and news stories even in North Carolina. In other words, just before the Good Roads boosters in the northwest corner of the state needed a memorable slogan to publicize their case, this term became available for a novel application.

One of the first examples I found in this period was published in 1873 by a paper near the coast: “should Marshal MacMahon continue in power five years more, tremendous effort will be made to recover the lost provinces and restore the military prestige of France” (Our Living and Our Dead, New Bern, 24 Dec 1873). Over the years, the term was applied to other territories—China's lost Khanate of Kashgar (Pee Dee Herald, Wadesboro, 7 Aug 1878), the territories lost by Mexico to the US (Fayetteville Weekly Observer, 6 Dec 1883), the Sudan (The Central Express, Sanford, 12 Apr 1890), etc. But it usually referred to Alsace-Lorraine.

In my search, I did not see the term applied to the northwestern counties until 1919—a bit of a challenge to my thesis, since the campaign did not seem to get underway until the following year. But the phrase was used in the context of the Good Roads movement in the northwest: “The ‘Lost Province’ engineers arrived last Friday evening for the purpose of making two preliminary surveys from North Wilkesboro” (North Wilkesboro Hustler, 4 July 1919). I suspect, but can’t prove, that the campaign was being organized behind the scenes and may already have found its slogan.

In any case, the slogan seems to have come into general use beginning with a banquet in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in November 1920. The purpose of the banquet was to support the Good Roads legislative program and to urge the allocation of funds to build and improve roads in Alleghany, Ashe, and Watauga counties. The keynote address was “Shall We Reclaim the Lost Provinces?” An article earlier in the week stated the Lost Provinces “will probably be the keynote for the plan that will be developed as a result of the meeting.” (The Sentinel, Winston-Salem, 23 Nov 1920). “Lost Provinces” was not mythos but marketing.

At least some understood that the term had been borrowed from a foreign context. In late December 1920, in a story headlined “Our Lost Provinces,” the Greensboro Record, wrote “North Carolina's Alsace and Lorraine were not torn from her by any foreign invader, but merely allowed to drift away through neglect” and because of “the mighty barrier” of the Blue Ridge.

Perhaps “Lost Provinces” also had the advantage of echoing the Lost Colony; the failed attempt to establish a permanent English settlement on Roanoke Island in the 16th century was a continuing topic of interest. Mystery and romance attached to the colonists’ unknown fate; perhaps “Lost Provinces” was an attempt to transfer some of that mystique to the plight of the remote mountain counties.

“Lost Provinces” was not used in The Hand-book of North Carolina: The Farms, Orchards & Vineyards, the Forests, Mines and Factories, a 333-page work published by the state in 1893. The handbook mentions the Lost Colony twice. It notes the remoteness of Ashe County, though with undue optimism ("the inaccessibility of Ashe County will soon be a thing of the past,” 319). Indeed, the entire mountain region is described as being, with some exceptions, “inaccessible to market” (7) and “inaccessible to transportation” (6). Still, semantically at least, the mountain counties were neither provinces nor lost. But by the time the State Ship and Water Transportation Commission issued its report in 1924, the term had, as shown above, entered the lexicon of policy makers.

[1] ID numbers and birth and date dates for family members are from FamilySearch.org.
[2] In the late 20’s, a young cousin named Rex Crouse (about 1913 – 1929, 9KGY-LKW) left the mountains in a similar way. He first went to West Virginia to work in the mines, but “I got tired of working in the dark so I just saved me up about $75.00 and sold every thing I had and started out on the Highway and flaged every Car that passed me.” Like John R. Grubb, he ended up in California, but he never left: he and his flight instructor were killed when the plane they were in power dove into the ground.—J.S. Absher, “The Letters of Rex Lee Crouse: A Sad Family Story of No Importance,” unpublished.
 
Posted 3 March 2026; revised 5 March 2016. Elevations are from online US topographic maps. Current travel times and distances are from Google Maps. 

As with many French poems by Rilke, I find the juxtaposition of images, the tone, and the surface simplicity of the verse deeply engaging.  It's why I continue to dabble with translating them, an effort that reminds me of my limits as a reader of French and poet. 

Vergers / Orchards

Give up your life so complicatable.
Look at your hand near the bread on the table:
on the clear cloth both of them are clear,
from father to son and son to father.

Love the earth’s celestial countryside
and the joy that evident suffering hides,
the tranquil window and the strict door
from father to son and son to father.

And always in their place, the kneeling things
and the dog that outdoes them, wagging,
so gentle a believer, never a doubter
from father to son and son to father.

****

Refuse-toi à la vie complicable.
Regarde ta main près du pain sur la table :
comme c’est clair, ces deux choses sur la nappe clair,
de père en fils et de fils en père.

Aime de la terre la compagne céleste
et la joie, cachée par la peine manifeste,
la fenêtre tranquille et la porte sévère
de père en fils et de fils en père.

Et les choses à genoux toujours à leurs place
et le chien qui remue et pourtant les surpasse,
très-doux croyant, ne doutant guère
de père en fils et de fils en père.

Posted 3 March 2026

Portrait by Joseph Karl Stieler, 1828 (in the public domain)

The Fairy King
Adapted from “Erlkönig” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Who rides, so late, a night so wild?
A father with his little child.
He keeps him snug in his strong arms,
holds him safe and keeps him warm.

“My son, why hide your face in fear?”
“Father, don’t you see the King,
the Fairy-King with crown and cape?”
“My son, it is a streak of mist.”

Come, dear child, and go with me!
All the fun games we will play!
Flowers bursting from each tree!
The golden robes my mother makes!

“My father, my father, do you not hear
What the King is promising me?”
“Be calm, stay calm, my little child;
it’s the wind sighing through dry leaves.”

Such a fine boy! Come, go with me.
My daughters will be your friends so true;
my daughters will lead you in the dance,
rocking and swaying and singing to you.

“My father, my father, don't you see
his daughters in this gloomy place?”
“My son, my son, it is the moon:
shimmering on the willows’ gray.”

I am excited by your beauty!
Come willingly or come by force.
“My father, can’t you spur the horse?
The Fairy King is hurting me!”

The father swiftly rides in dread,
the moaning boy held in his arms,
reaches exhausted his little farm
and on his breast the child is dead.

******
​
Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind?
Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind;
Er hat den Knaben wohl in dem Arm,
Er faßt ihn sicher, er hält ihn warm.

Mein Sohn, was birgst du so bang dein Gesicht?
Siehst, Vater, du den Erlkönig nicht?
Den Erlenkönig mit Kron' und Schweif?
Mein Sohn, es ist ein Nebelstreif.

"Du liebes Kind, komm, geh mit mir!
Gar schöne Spiele spiel' ich mit dir;
Manch' bunte Blumen sind an dem Strand,
Meine Mutter hat manch gülden Gewand."

Mein Vater, mein Vater, und hörest du nicht,
Was Erlenkönig mir leise verspricht?
Sei ruhig, bleibe ruhig, mein Kind;
In dürren Blättern säuselt der Wind.

"Willst, feiner Knabe, du mit mir gehn?
Meine Töchter sollen dich warten schön;
Meine Töchter führen den nächtlichen Reihn,
Und wiegen und tanzen und singen dich ein."

Mein Vater, mein Vater, und siehst du nicht dort
Erlkönigs Töchter am düstern Ort?
Mein Sohn, mein Sohn, ich seh' es genau:
Es scheinen die alten Weiden so grau.

"Ich liebe dich, mich reizt deine schöne Gestalt;
Und bist du nicht willig, so brauch' ich Gewalt."
Mein Vater, mein Vater, jetzt faßt er mich an!
Erlkönig hat mir ein Leids getan!

Dem Vater grauset's; er reitet geschwind,
Er hält in den Armen das ächzende Kind,
Erreicht den Hof mit Mühe und Not;
In seinen Armen, das Kind war tot.

(A performance of Schubert’s setting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JS91p-vmSf0)

Posted 19 Feb 2026

Eleven days before Thanksgiving in 1907, a postcard was sent to Mrs. J. M. Brisco of Marion, Virginia, by AK. The front of the card has a picture of the Aragon Hotel in Jacksonville, Florida, and the card bears a Jacksonville postmark. The card has an odd design that encouraged terseness: the back of the card is reserved for the recipient’s address ([Th]is side for the address), and the front has only a small vertical white strip for the sender’s message.

To the extent that poetry is the art of dividing an utterance into lines to provide rhythm and emphasis, the message may be read as a poem:
 
The worst
is not
yet over
but Dr. says
he will try
and fix me
up so that
I can eat
turkey
Thanksgiving.
He works
two hours
each night.
It's some-
thing fierce,
too. He
is about
half through.
Will write
letter soon.
 
AK
 
The note has end rhyming/slant rhyming {me, eat, turkey) and internal rhyming combined with end rhyming (too, through, soon). Found poetry places intention in the reader (“I choose to read this as a poem”) rather than the writer.

Another odd creation of modern aesthetic sensibility is the erasure poem, defined as "a poetic form in which a poet blacks out or in some way erases words from a preexisting source to create new poems" (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/education/glossary/erasure-poetry). By that definition, our postcard is not an erasure poem, but in a deeper sense, it is: to the extent the message has poetic interest, it is because the context has been erased. Someone ailing in Jacksonville, known to us only by initials, is receiving painful medical treatments two hours each night in order to eat Thanksgiving dinner eleven days later. With the postcard as our only source, we don’t know the relationship of writer and recipient, the diagnosis, the nature of the treatment, the prognosis. We don’t know why the writer was in Jacksonville: perhaps AK lived there, perhaps AK went there to seek medical treatment, perhaps AK came to visit family and was detained by illness, perhaps on the way somewhere else AK was forced to stop in Jacksonville because of the illness.

The unknowns may provoke the writing of a poem, the writing of a story, the conducting of historical research.

Background and Research

Around 1960, the year I turned nine, my family moved into the Brisco home on Sheffey Street in Marion, Virginia. I don’t know who had lived in the house immediately before we moved in. As a child, I understood that the owner of the house, Nathan Brisco (1909-1955), had killed himself, thus making the house available for sale. This may be true, but he had died in 1955. The death certificate gives the cause of death as "accidental self-inflicted gunshot wound of head.” The newspapers of the time stated that he "died Saturday, November 26, of a shotgun wounded, accidentally self-inflicted during a fall down the stairs while preparing to go hunting" (1). This was two days after Thanksgiving. There were no witnesses. His “body was discovered by his wife as she returned from a visit with her son at VMI. He was dressed in hunting clothes and still held the shotgun, officers said." (2)

My family knew an African American handyman, Joe. He told us that he had cleaned Brisco’s brains off the wall of the staircase that led to the basement. We were in the room when he told us, pointing to the very wall he had cleaned, a wall that in our day was painted a dark shade of pink. To my mind the color was at once appropriate and in very poor taste.

Nathan was survived by a widow, Helen. Perhaps she sold my parents the house. Those who lived in the house before us left behind books and several issues of the National Geographic from the time of the building of the Panama Canal. One of the books was a Converse College annual from 1922. Ruth Brisco (1899-1979), Nathan’s oldest sister, was the owner of the annual and an alum of Converse. She was at Converse when Billy Sunday preached there. I still have several books signed by her, including Rudyard Kipling’s The Light that Failed. (To my sorrow, the National Geographics were left behind when we moved away in 1963.)

Only when my mom died this summer, at the age of 92, did we find, in a box in the attic, another book left behind by the Brisco’s, a postcard album probably collected by Daisy Kennon Brisco (1875 – 1948), mother of Ruth and Nathan, and wife of James Monroe Brisco. She is addressed on the cards as “Mrs. J.M. Brisco,” in the style of that prefeminist time, and is the recipient of the postcard from AK. In some of the postcards’ greetings, she is called Aunt Daisy or simply as D.

A peek at Daisy Brisco’s family tree suggests that the postcard came from her brother, William Alfred Kennon (1886 - 1951). He was likely known by his middle name, Alfred; in the mountains of North Carolina and Virginia, it was a common practice at the time and for some time after. My parents named me John Stanley with the intention of calling me Stanley. Two of my three brothers are also known by their middle names, and the third would have been had my grandmother not objected so strongly to the middle name because of its distressing associations. My father, John Thomas, went by his first name, but he had an uncle and a brother-in-law named John Thomas, and both went by Tom.

In 1907, Alfred was a young man—he had turned 21 on October 30—so he may have been in Jacksonville for work. Based on the little research I’ve done, it’s clear that Jacksonville was booming at the time. It was a favorite spot for winter tourists. One hundred passenger trains arrived there daily, I’ve read, and Jacksonville would shortly become an important center for the making of silent movies. The financial panic in the fall of 1907 seems to have had little effect on the local economy, beyond temporarily halting a number of construction projects. Many were completed the following year, including a bridge, extensions of the streetcar system, and development of the streetcar suburbs. (3)

Daisy probably would have liked more than Alfred’s brief note, but he promised a letter to follow. Perhaps the turkey he hoped to eat was from his sister’s kitchen. Not his wife’s: he recovered from his illness sufficiently to marry in February of the following year and to live another 43 years.

By June 1917, he had two children and was making his living in Greenville, TN, as a printer for the Greenville Democrat (4). In the 1920 and 1930 census records, he was still employed as a newspaper printer. It’s possible he was already a printer in 1907, but I’ve found no proof of that.

Alfred is my wife’s seventh cousin twice removed.

The Poetry that Remains

To answer some of the questions surrounding AK’s postcard is not to know the Brisco’s. The details gleaned from public records are useful but do not reveal them. Unless the government made it its business to know them, the ordinary facts about them have been erased by death, the passage of time, and the scant documentation. Knowing them personally would not have exhausted the depths of their being, even if they were quite ordinary. They probably were a mystery to themselves.

The Briscos’ importance to me is accidental but profound: it comes from my family’s encounter with their house, a few of their belongings, and the one story about them we heard, Nathan’s accidental suicide, and our mutual celebration of Thanksgiving with turkey. As a kid, possibly based on how Joe told us about it, I assumed he killed himself intentionally. I did not foresee that my father would also leave this world by his own hand.


Traveling Inside My Room

I heard the children playing in the town pool.
From across the street and down a steep bank,
their laughter rose up to tempt me, along with
their tinny music, diminished with the distance

like a tall boat on the horizon shrunk to nothing.
I was on my bed, window open, reading--
Gulliver was waking to find himself
staked under a burning sun, his clothing

and hair knotted to fine strings, the strings pegged
to the ground by tiny people with tiny
voices, like a tin-can telephone’s. I wanted
to splash and tan in the sun, but, even more,

to be rescued from the weak and small, that
first summer I stayed inside my head. 

****

That book, and others, we’d found in the house
when we moved in. It was signed in a neat
round hand on the flyleaf Nathan B., a man
who’d killed himself and left his sister alone.

You can read books and do yourself in. Or not
read them, and do the same. I own his The Light
that Failed and his sister’s college annual
from ’22, when Billy Sunday came

and preached the Book, and maybe saved her
from what her brother did. Or made her laugh.
I own a book of poems Daddy annotated
in the months before he did himself in.

I dogear pages and scribble notes. Dear book,
they promise, someday I’m coming back to you.

Webster’s Reading Room (Old Mountain Press, 2020)


Ruth Brisco

The books in the poem actually belonged to Ruth, but I forgot that fact as I focused on the drama of the deaths self-inflicted by Nathan and my father. I imagined Ruth being left alone, abandoned by Nathan. I did not know till now that she had another sibling, Virgina Francis, or that she had a life of her own: in 1955 she was working as a librarian in Hampton, Virginia. 

Newport News Daily Press, 7 Jan 1955, p. 3

Ruth never married and her death certificate shows that schizophrenia contributed to her death (5). Here's another familial link: my father’s schizophrenia materially contributed to his early death.

Notes

(1) Culpeper Star-Exponent, 1 Dec 1955, p 23. All newspaper quotations and pictures are from via Newspapers.com.
(2) Bristol Virginia-Tennessean, 29 Nov 1955, p. 1.
(3) T. Frederick Davis, History of Jacksonville, Florida and Vicinity, 1513 to 1924, reprinted by Jazzybee Verlag Jürgen Beck.
(4) “United States, World War I Draft Registration Cards, 1917-1918”, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:WSZ3-RS2M: Entry for William Alfred Kennon, from 1917 to 1918).
(5) "Virginia, Death Certificates, 1912-1987", FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QVYP-5RFT: Entry for Ruth Littleton Brisco and James Monroe Brisco, 29 Jun 1979).

Edited 2 Dec 2025

Cover of Visions International number 95, published in 2017. See below for poems from this issue. ​

​From 2005 through 2023, at least sixteen of my poems were selected by the editor and proprietor, Bradley Strahan, for publication in Visions International. In some ways, I felt that the first of these poems, “Wasted, Not Needed,” marked a milestone in my ever-modest poetic career. I saw a classified ad in Poets and Writers seeking submissions. I bought a sample copy, recognized that many of my poems were compatible with the editor’s sensibility, and successfully submitted. I have continued to enjoy the excellent work selected by Brad, not least the translations into English from international poets. I always liked submitting to Brad: he made up his mind and communicated his decisions quickly. I look forward to continued excellence under the editorship of Brad’s successor, Cal Nordt.

Many of the poems are reproduced here in scanned copies from the magazine. Where I kept a record, I’ve noted the issue number and year of publication.

“Wasted, Not Needed,” later retitled “Ripeness Is All,” was republished in my chapbook, Night Weather, in Scott Owens’ review of Night Weather, and in the Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol. VII: North Carolina.
 
No. 73, 2005

No. 80, 2009
True incident. 

No. 95, 2017 (the cover is shown above)
I was selected by Brad as the number's featured poet. As I was writing this post, I came across an online appreciation of the magazine and of this number by B. Morrison: “Each issue also has a featured poet, with several pages devoted to their work. In this issue the featured poet is J.S. Absher of Raleigh, NC. One of his poems, ‘The Past and Time to Come’, starts with a cow grazing in a meadow and moves through the lovely names of their four stomachs into a scene where a salesman is philosophising [sic] about time in a bar. Sounds odd perhaps, but the juxtaposition works.” It's the juxtaposition of rural and urban, of time as season and time as commodity. The boy can't say what he knows; the salesman can't stop talking. 

​Perhaps I was reminded of the Edith Piaf song quoted in the poem below when I watched Saving Private Ryan (1998). Whenever a poem comes together only reluctantly, as this one did, I think of something that Czeslaw Milosz wrote: "straining [in poetry] comes to nothing, for we receive the gift whether we are deserving of it or not" ("Ambition," in Milosz's ABC's).

No. 104, Feb 2021
The two poems in this issue are old. “We Lay Our Burdens on Time” originated in an experience I had as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” in France in the period 1972-1973. I don't remember when I started the poem, but it was a long time ago. "Alive" was drafted not long after the events it describes from 1990. 

​Alive
1990           

I sit on your porch. I’ve painted the house inside
and helped you move. You keep the refrigerator,
the washer and dryer; I keep the car.
We split the child, Solomon-like. 

For some reason we look up and see
fifty or sixty red-necked vultures
climbing a massive thermal, towering
over some dead body. 

Something is dead, but we are alive,
our son is alive and safe. 
In the marsh across the yard
peepers and croakers, in their strident

amphibian heat, are carrying on.
We part with an awkward, reluctant
hug. Nature may be indifferent
to the singers, but the chorus sings on. 

2022 or 2023
Heifer
 
Destined for slaughter
she wades into the water
to the belly and drinks deep.

Does she see her own sad eyes
wide and innocent in the pool
looking up out of the sky?

Soon fear will make her bellow,
but now her muzzle is cool
and wet. Her skin twitches,

scattering flies; her switch
brushes them off. Across the water
she sees a pasture

she will never graze,
a clump of trees
that will never give her shade.
 
 
Tell Me Where All Past Years Are
 
She had a broad lap, a feed sack apron.
We sat warming on the stoop,
and everything around falling
fell onto her sack, golden
catkins, chinquapin burs, pods
of locust sticky with their honey,
dust of stars, dust out of the furrows.
She hummed; I translate:
     When will the time come back to me
when hours were in my pocket
as many and heavy as loose pennies, 
when days oozed thicker than
end-of-summer honey, when happiness
formed in my hands like butter from the churn
to squeeze and pat into a cake
and print with a petal crown of daisies?
     Now we both are humming, sixty or more
years between renditions, and while
we sing the sun clocks out and the moon
on the ridgetop stands and shakes out its lap,
a glowing radium dial.
 
No. 108, 2023 

In the last three months, I have been away from home more than half the time dealing with illness and death in the family and the emotions and the mountain of work that follow the death of the last living parent. The details of the work that seems so onerous now—handling the legal and financial responsibilities, sorting through Mom’s belongings to decide what to keep or give away or throw away, and identifying photos, letters, mementoes, and other items that should be preserved for the next generation—will in memory be simplified and eventually, perhaps, forgotten. But many of the pictures and newspaper clippings will live on in the archives of FamilySearch.org. as I scan and upload them.
 
Settling the estate belongs to personal and family history, but often enough the photos, newspaper clippings (many from the mid-1940s), and mementoes evoke history writ large. When I was a little boy, I had a Hav-A-Tampa cigar box full of paper money. In going through the boxes Mom stored in the attic, I came across the money (but not the box). The million-mark note shown above, apparently issued in Trier in 1928, is an ugly bit of work, even without the tape browned by age. The tape looks no worse now than it did almost 70 years ago. It wasn’t sticky then and isn’t now. This bill is the only one in the stash I clearly remember.

I don’t remember trying to read the writing on the note; that’s rather odd, because I read everything, often aloud, including billboards along the highway. But we didn’t have a German dictionary (and may not have had a dictionary of any kind until I got a Thorndike-Barnhart in the fourth grade). I remember wondering whether the note was worth a lot, but someone (probably Daddy) explained the hyperinflation that ravaged Germany in the early 1920s and made money worthless. What Daddy didn’t explain, and perhaps didn’t know, is that the German currency stabilized after 1924, so I still don’t know what value, if any, the bill ever possessed.

The million-mark note provided a memorable lesson in history, a discovery of terrible things that had happened and could happen again. The note did evoke an interest in economics, but it did waken an historical imagination that links an insignificant artifact to faraway events and cultures and foreshadows future dreadful possibilities. 
 
I don’t recall using the bills in play, though perhaps I’ve forgotten. I liked to look at them and the now lost stripes from my father’s uniform that were also in the box.
 
A picture of the recovered stash is below. When I was a kid, I liked world maps. My favorite was a jigsaw puzzle that had the United States on one side and a world map on the other. The US map was brightly colored and cheerful; the world map was darker and foreboding—no doubt a lesson in history and nationalism. In a small way, I also collected foreign postage stamps; like the notes below, they provided a kind of map to the world, bearing images of heroes, rulers, and monuments unknown to me that represented peoples and cultures with their own history.
 

At moments like now, when a demon's face appears to be rising above the horizon, I think of Walter Benjamin's "angel of history, which flies backwards with its hands raised to its face, appalled by the spectacle of the ruins piling up constantly before its eyes" (Clive James, "Hegel," in Cultural Amnesia, Norton, 2007, p. 307).

Posted 15 September 2025