America, one equal temper of heroic hearts.
December 6, 2006

I'm setting out on the good ship Blog for the first time. In my entries I hope to show something of the greatness of the America that I travel through day after day because of my work; the suits at HQ say I'm a VP of Marketing, but I'm really just a demo guy, half carnival barker, half green-shade bean counter and a quarter Cherokee. Sure, the American character is in danger, waning or ebbing in places, but still is harbored here that heroic questing quality that has marked our civilization as one apart, different and proud of that difference--as Willie Nelson sings, too proud to do things that make the rest of the world think we're right. I think I've seen some of that quality in my travels and hope to transmit it faithfully in my entries. With this thought in mind, it is fitting, I think, to begin with some excerpted lines from Lord Alfred Tennyson's poem, Ulysses, written late in the 19th c. as England's questing nature was beginning to wane. The poem speaks gloriously of the yearning of the quester and wisely of the failures that every noble endeavor must encounter and, finally, longingly of the heroism of the few who persevere--I think Tennyson was witness to the quest of Western Civilization passing west out of England towards American harbors.

". . . I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades
Forever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains; but every hour is saved
From eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
. . .
Death closes all; but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks;
The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are--
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."