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When I began doing occasional “mending walls” posts some time ago, I didn’t stop to make the meme clear to folks who may lack the historical/cultural background to catch it.
Mea culpa. While I did at one time cite a late cultural referrence that demonstrated our society’s tension with the idea of walls (the Frost poem, of course), I thought perhaps a little more background might make the analogy to our society’s need to defend itself from predators a bit clearer.
Let’s take a pretty basic cultural reference to “mending walls” that anyone from the early 20th century and previously with just a bare literacy would almost automatically associate with “mending walls”. (They would do so, because they’d have at least a passing familiarity with the single most influential book in the English language… ) Continue reading “Mending Walls: the concept”