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.
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Anthony Esolen is a professor and writer-in-residence at Magdalene College of the Liberal Arts in Warner, New Hampshire. His many books include Sex in the Unreal City: The Demolition of the Western Mind, Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord. He is a regular contributor to Chronicles, Crisis Magazine, The Claremont Review, Inside the Vatican Things, The Catholic Thing, and American Greatness. He has translated Dante's Divine Comedy. He is a Roman Catholic and lives with his wife in New Hampshire. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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