I'm reading
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393049051/qid%3D1000651907/103-
3104662-8743048">I, Roger Williams, by Mary Lee Settle, because I don't
want to plunge entirely into escapism (though I'm also reading The Little
Colonel's Holidays online) and so I decided it would be appropriate to read
something about the taproot of my country.
According to Settle,
whose interview on NPR I caught one morning(the
href=http://www.wamu.org/dr/">Diane Rehm show, I think) some of Roger
Williams' writings are at the base of some of the ideas in our Declaration of
Independence and Constitution. He was the one who insured that at least one
colony, Rhode Island, truly had freedom of religion, instead of being like the
others, ruled over by those who had come to escape persecution for their beliefs,
only to turn and persecute other in their turn. Perhaps this book is more
relevant than I had thought.
Settle has obviously spent years
immersed in Williams' letters. The voice in her book is that of a dreaming old man
returning to live over his past, making sense of it and seeing the connections he
missed while living it as it happened. She says in her afterword that she
deliberately uses the voice of his letters, because his formal writings are
convoluted and polished, according to the custom of the time, while the letters,
written in haste while a courier waited, show his thoughts more vividly.
It's not an easy read, echoing an idiom three centuries dead, but of
course the pacing was set by a modern author and it cannot be as alien as a true
diary of the time would be. It is an absorbing read, though, and a bit comforting,
since it speaks of an old man who has outlived his own cataclysms and upheavals
and arrived at peace.
It is an absorbing read, though, and a bit comforting,
since it speaks of an old man who has outlived his own cataclysms and upheavals
and arrived at peace.