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 Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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