The Invisible Republic We Hold In Our Hearts

I claim as kin father Emerson, brother Thoreau, and weird uncle Walt, but friends and neighbors abound.

Old man Melville lives in the big house high on the hill, overlooking the port, while Billy Faulkner, displaced scion of the old south, haunts the dirty bars down by the docks.

And what of Tecumseh, and Frederick Douglass? We feel their presence in the streets and alleyways, but we should be walking next to them, side by side. Such is the state of our American exile.

Emily Dickinson is but a silhouette against the shade of a window that looks out on Main Street when the shutters are not closed. Woody Guthrie, whooping like a wild bird on the street corner, keeps his guitar case open for loose change. Mr. Stevens, solemn at his desk, shuffles papers while dreaming in tropical hues. Jack London pilots a skiff in the bay; Robinson Jeffers buys a ticket at the station for the first train headed west.

Henry Miller, uncle Walt's sketchy disciple, and yet a genius all the same, goes out for drinks with the bearded lady when the circus is in town. And moody Tom Wolfe, lately from Chapel Hill, tries his hand at playwriting at the kitchen table of his mother's boarding house while old Sam Clemons smokes a cigar outside the bank and cracks rueful jokes under his breath.

This is but a small sample of the dramatis personae who populate the Invisible Republic we hold in our hearts.