A Geography of Kind
The Preservation of Landscapes & the Beauty of the Sexes
by Anthony Esolen
When I was a boy we lived at the back end of a glacier. True, it was a glacier in retreat, and had disappeared a few thousand years before I was born, but it had done its work well, and for that I was grateful. It had backhoed up long corrugations in the land—we called them “mountains”—like furrows in a rug. Between these furrows snaked the drain-water, a “river” as it came to be called, gouging out a long narrow valley where Irishmen would come looking for farmland and would find instead a soil shiny black and gritty: a sign of coal.
Miners, first the Irish and Welsh . . .
