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All America lies at the end of the wilderness road,
and our past is not a dead past,
but still lives in us.
Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves,
the wild outside.
We live in the civilization they created,
but within us the wilderness still lingers.
What they dreamed, we live,
and what they lived, we dream.
T.K. Whipple (1890-1939) . . .
as quoted by Mike Brown in the Rockdale Reporter . . .
and as quoted by Larry McMurtry
in his epigraph to Lonesome Dove
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"A lively desire of knowing and recording our ancestors so generally prevails that it must depend on the influence of some common principle in the minds of men.
We seem to have lived in the persons of our forefathers; it is the labor and reward of vanity to extend the term of this ideal longevity.
Our imagination is always active to enlarge the narrow circle in which nature has confined us.
We fill up the silent vacancy that precedes our birth by associating ourselves to the authors of our existence."
Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) as quoted in The family of Early, which settled upon the eastern shore of Virginia and its connection with other families (1920)
