Anti-Climacus

LINK: I don't think much of this essay on why 'southern' literature is considered a valid category (as opposed to 'new england' literature, e.g.)--long sections on Self and Other have that effect on me--but the epigram is well-chosen:

Even today the Northern visitor hankers to see eroded hills and rednecks…to sniff the effluvium of backwoods-and-sandhill subhumanity and to see at least one barn burn at midnight. So he looks at me with crafty misgivings, as if to say, “Well, you do talk rather glibly about Kierkegaard and Sartre…but after all, you’re only fooling, aren’t you? Don’t you, sometimes, go out secretly by owl-light to drink swampwater and feed on sowbelly and collard greens?”

—George B. Tindall, in the 1963 speech “The Idea of the South.”