_2_

Interpreters of the Land

"HE'S FOR A JIG or a tale of bawdry, or he sleeps." Thought
employs ideas, but having an idea is not the same thing as
thinking. A rooster in a pen of hens has an idea. Thought
has never been so popular with mankind as horse opera, horse
play, the main idea behind sheep's eyes. Far be it from me
to feel contempt for people who cannot and do not want
to think. The human species has not yet evolved to the stage
at which thought is natural. I am far more at ease lying in
grass and gazing without thought process at clouds than in
sitting in a chair trying to be logical. Just the same, free play
of mind upon life is the essence of good writing, and intellectual
activity is synonymous with critical interpretations.

To the constant disregard of thought, Americans of the
mid-twentieth century have added positive opposition. Critical
ideas are apt to make any critic suspected of being
subversive. The Southwest, Texas especially, is more articulately
aware of its land spaces than of any other feature pertaining
to itself. Yet in the realm of government, the Southwest has
not produced a single spacious thinker. So far as the cultural
ancestry of the region goes, the South has been arid of
thought since the time of Thomas Jefferson, the much talked-
of mind of John C. Calhoun being principally casuistic; on
another side, derivatives from the Spanish Inquisition could