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Kansas
Excerpt from Kansas
Some years ago, in a New England college town, when I informed one of my New England friends that I was preparing to go to Kansas, he replied rather blankly, Kansas?! Oh. The amenities of casual intercourse demanded a reply, certainly, but from the point of View of my New England friend I suppose there was really nothing more to say; and, in fact, standing there under the peaceful New England elms, Kansas did seem tolerably remote. Some months later I rode out of Kansas City and entered for the first time what I had always pictured as the land of grasshoppers, of arid drought, and barren social experimentation. In the seat just ahead were two young women, girls rather, whom I afterwards saw at the university. As we left the dreary yards behind, and entered the half-open country along the Kansas River, one of the pair, breaking abruptly away from the ceaseless chatter that had hitherto engrossed them both, began looking out of the car window. Her attention seemed fixed, for perhaps a quarter of an hour, upon something in the scene outside - the fields of corn, or it may have been the sunflowers that lined the track; but at last, turning to her companion with the contented sigh of a returning exile, she said, Dear old Kansas! The expression somehow re - called my New England friend. I wondered vaguely, as I was sure he would have done, why any one should feel moved to say Dear old Kansas! I had supposed that Kansas, even more than Italy, was only a geographical expression. But not so. Not infrequently, since then, I have heard the same expression - not always from emotional young girls. To understand why people say Dear.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
Some years ago, in a New England college town, when I informed one of my New England friends that I was preparing to go to Kansas, he replied rather blankly, Kansas?! Oh. The amenities of casual intercourse demanded a reply, certainly, but from the point of View of my New England friend I suppose there was really nothing more to say; and, in fact, standing there under the peaceful New England elms, Kansas did seem tolerably remote. Some months later I rode out of Kansas City and entered for the first time what I had always pictured as the land of grasshoppers, of arid drought, and barren social experimentation. In the seat just ahead were two young women, girls rather, whom I afterwards saw at the university. As we left the dreary yards behind, and entered the half-open country along the Kansas River, one of the pair, breaking abruptly away from the ceaseless chatter that had hitherto engrossed them both, began looking out of the car window. Her attention seemed fixed, for perhaps a quarter of an hour, upon something in the scene outside - the fields of corn, or it may have been the sunflowers that lined the track; but at last, turning to her companion with the contented sigh of a returning exile, she said, Dear old Kansas! The expression somehow re - called my New England friend. I wondered vaguely, as I was sure he would have done, why any one should feel moved to say Dear old Kansas! I had supposed that Kansas, even more than Italy, was only a geographical expression. But not so. Not infrequently, since then, I have heard the same expression - not always from emotional young girls. To understand why people say Dear.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
59 pages, Paperback
Published February 10, 2017
About the author
Carl Lotus Becker
88 books15 followersCarl Lotus Becker was an American historian. He is best known for The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (1932), four lectures on The Enlightenment delivered at Yale University. His assertion that philosophies, in the "Age of Reason," relied far more upon Christian assumptions than they cared to admit, has been influential, but has also been much attacked,
Cornell has recognized his work as an educator by naming one of its five new residential colleges the Carl Becker House.
Cornell has recognized his work as an educator by naming one of its five new residential colleges the Carl Becker House.
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