Going south from here Franklin and I fell into a very curious and intricate discussion. The subtlety of some people’s private speculations at times astonishes me. Not that our conversation was at all extraordinary from any point of view, but it was so peculiar in spots. I am not wildly intoxicated by the spirit of my native state, not utterly so at any rate; yet I must admit that there is something curiously different about it—delicate, poetic, generative—I hardly know what I want to say. On the way there I had been saying to Franklin that I doubted whether I should find the West still the same or whether it was as generative and significant as I had half come to make myself believe it was. After leaving Warsaw I had remarked that either I or the town had changed greatly, and since the town looked the same, it must be me. To this he assented and now added:
“You should go sometime to a Speedway race at Indianapolis, as I have often, year after year since it was first built. There, just when the first real summer days begin to take on that wonderful light, and a kind of luminous silence over things suggests growing corn and ripening wheat and quails whistling in the meadows over by the woods, you will find an assemblage of people from all over this country and from other countries—cars by the thousands with foreign licenses; which make you feel that this is the center of things. I’ve been there, and getting a bit tired of watching the cars have gone over into the woods inside the grounds and lain down on the grass on my back. There would be the same familiar things about me, the sugar and hickory trees, the little cool breeze that comes up in the middle of the day, through the foliage, the same fine sky that I used to look up into when a boy; but, circling around me continuously for hours, coming up from the south and along the great stretches, and from the north bank of the track, were the weird roar and thunder of an international conflict. Then I would get up and look away south along the grandstands and see flying in the Indiana sunlight the flags of all the great nations, Italy and England, France and Belgium, Holland and Germany. So I sometimes think the spirit that has been instrumental in distinguishing this particular section from other sections of the country is something still effective; that it does not always lead away from itself; that it has established its freedom from isolation and mere locality and accomplished here a quite vital contact with universal thought.”
“That’s all very flattering to Indiana,” I said, “but do you really believe that?”
“Indeed I do,” he replied. “This is a most peculiar state. Almost invariably, on socalled clear days in July and August out here, an indescribable haze over everything leaves the horizons unaccounted for and the distance a sort of mystery. This, it has always seemed to me, is bound to produce in certain types of mind a kind of unrest. In such light, buzzards hanging high above you or crows flying over the woods are no longer merely the things that they are but become the symbols of a spiritual, if I may use the word, or æsthetic, suggestiveness that is unescapable. The forests here also, or such as used to be here, must have had their influence. Temples and cathedrals, all works of art, are designed to impress men’s minds, leading them into varying conditions of consciousness. The forests of sugar and beech and poplar and oak and hickory about here originally, it has been said, were the most wonderful on the face of the earth. No one had ever experimented with the action of such things as these on people’s minds, to determine specific results, but I fancy they have them. In fact I sometimes think there is something about soil and light, a magnetism or creative power like the electric generative field of a dynamo, which produces strange, new, interesting things. How else can you explain the fact that ‘Ben Hur’ was written out here at Crawfordville, under a beech tree, or why the first automobile course, after Brooklands, England, was built here at Indianapolis, or why La Salle, with a company of adventurers, should come canoeing down the St. Joseph and the Maumee into this region? I believe thoroughly in the presence of a great resource of relative truth, constituted of the facts of all human things; that this resource is available to anyone whoever or wherever he may be, who can, in his mind, achieve a clear understanding of his own freedom from the necessities of mere physical communication. This may seem to be getting a little thin but it is not beside the actual point if you trouble to think of it.”
“That’s rather flattering to dear old Indiana,” I repeated, “but still I’m not sure that I’m absolutely convinced. You make out a fairly plausible case.”
“Look at the tin plate trust,” he continued, “one of the first and most successful. It originated in Kokomo and expanded until it controlled the Rock Island Railway, Diamond Match, and other corporations. Look at the first American automobile—it came from here—and James Whitcomb Riley and George Ade and Tarkington, and other things like that.”
“Yes, ‘and other things like that,’” I quoted. “You’re right.”
I did not manage to break in on his dream, however.
“Take this man Haynes, for instance, and his car. Here is a case where the soil or the light or the general texture of the country generated a sense of freedom, right here in Indiana in a single mind, and to a great result; but instead of his going away or its taking that direction, Haynes developed his own sense of freedom right here by building his motor car here. He rose above his local limitations without leaving. Through his accomplishment he has made possible a fine freedom for some of the rest of us. After all, individual freedom is not simply the inclination and the liberty to get up and go elsewhere; nor is it, as people seem to think, something only to be embodied in forms of government. I consider it something quite detached from any kind of government whatever, a thing which exists in the human mind and, indeed, is mind.”
Franklin was at his very best, I thought.