Sherry Chandler

Well, my dears, I am back in the flatlands with a tote bag full of books and a reading list a mile long. No way I’m gonna process the last week in one blog post, especially with my brain still in workshop mode, so this morning I’ll just give you a few more quotes from the peripatetic, hilarious, and learned lectures on Appalachian literature by Robert J. Higgs. Here is a man who seems to have read everything of any importance in the field of letters and quoted freely from all of it so I can’t be sure that everything I wrote down as his words was original to him. He always attributed but the ear is slow and the hand slower.

Aphorisms from Jack Higgs:

The sacred fills you with pride; the holy humbles you.

Wisdom, power, strength – in trinity equal.

There’s always a contribution somewhere if you look.

You can’t begin to write about yourself until you see your self as two people. (See below about difference between self and ego.)

Ideas = archetypes, values = stereotypes. But don’t be too hard on the stereotypes. We could have no archetypes without stereotypes.

Tragedy and comedy are inextricable. If things get tragic enough, something funny happens.

Wherever you have the heroic, you’re going to have a comic. The hero always has a sidekick, all the way back to Falstaff.

Melville didn’t say there is no hope for America. He just said he didn’t see any.

The function of the sacred is to make you aware of the holy. There’s not a twig on a tree out there that’s not holier than any church.

In answer to Poppysmatus, the event was a workshop, not a symposium. Knott is a dry county, Hindman Settlement School is a church-related organization, and we were told in no uncertain terms in our packet materials that “No alcoholic beverages, illegal drugs, or firearms are allowed on campus.”

On the other hand, Perry County is wet (and it might not have been necessary to go that far). I heard rumors that some symposium-type activities may have taken place after hours. I may even have heard Mike Mullins utter the words “be discreet,” though I can’t swear to it. I, of course, went back to my quiet little cell in the Quiltmaker Inn every evening and slept the sleep of the innocent.