THIS RADICAL LAND - PDF
نویسندگان: DAEGAN MILLER
خلاصه: Then the coal company came with the world’s largest shovel, And they tortured the timber, and stripped all the land. Well, they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken, And they wrote it all down as the progress of man. John Prine, “Paradise”1 What happens when the past’s oldest witness comes crashing down dead? A new day will dawn . . . but over what? Where are we, who are we, when the bough breaks? Bostonians opened their eyes on a Wednesday morning in 1876 to opaque February skies bleakly blanketing a city made suddenly strange. At 7 p.m. the evening before, the enormous Great Elm on the famous Boston Common had been toppled by a hard wind.2 Of course, trees fall all the time with never a thought spared them, but the Great Elm was dif- ferent. It was famous in the nineteenth-century as an emissary from the past, and it appears ubiquitously in prose, poem, and print, a people’s treasured heirloom, believed to be among the last living witnesses to the young nation’s milestones; its loss was disorienting. Paul Revere, on his 1775 midnight ride, was rumored to have passed by the tree