Speeches and basements

Bright and early this morning (around 3 am), Jeff City was pounded by some pretty gnarly storms. When I say pounded, I mean it. We had a few rounds of golf ball sized hail slamming the area. I've never heard anything like it. I was in the basement alone, because I couldn't get Iris to come down so I left her upstairs. She was unhappy about that once the storm was over, but maybe she'll trust in my judgment next time when I'm trying to get her in the basement. It was like the house was in the middle of a driving range and people were just standing in the street hitting golf balls at the house as hard as they could. For like, 10 minutes. And then another 5 or so later. It was incredible. I thought for sure my car was going to be totally dented, but it wasn't. I have some scrapes on the windshield, but nothing major. While I was hanging out in the basement, I took my speeches book I was talking about in the previous post. It's really good! I paced the basement during the storm reading aloud Robespierre's speech Justifying Terror in the French Revolution. If you can imagine me in my pajamas and glasses roaming my century-old house's basement reading aloud over the pounding of hail on windows and metal gutters:

"What is the goal toward which we are heading? The peaceful enjoyment of liberty and equality; the reign of that eternal justice whose laws have been inscribed, not in marble and stone, but in the hearts of all men, even in that of the slave who forgets them and in that of the tyrant who denies them.

We seek an order of things in which all the base and cruel passions are enchained, all the beneficent and generous passions are awakened by the laws; where ambition becomes the desire to merit glory and to serve our country; where distinctions are born only of equality itself; where the citizen is subject to the magistrate, the magistrate to the people, and the people to justice; where our country assures the well-being of each individual, and where each individual proudly enjoys our country's prosperity and glory; where every soul grows greater through the continual flow of republican sentiments, and by the need of deserving the esteem of a great people; where the arts are the adornments of the liberty which ennobles them and commerce the source of public wealth rather than solely the monstrous opulence of a few families.

In our land we want to substitute morality for egotism, integrity for formal codes of honor, principles for customs, a sense of duty for one of mere propriety, the rule of reason for the tyranny of fashion, scorn of vice of scorn of the unlucky, self-respect for insolence, grandeur of soul over vanity, love of glory for the love of money, good people in place of good society. We wish to substitute merit for intrigue, genius for wit, truth for glamour, the charm of happiness for sensuous boredom, the greatness of man for the pettiness of the great, a people who are magnanimous, powerful, and happy, in place of a kindly, frivolous, and miserable people - which is to say all the virtues and all the miracles of the republic in place of all the vices and all the absurdities of the monarchy."

It's a pretty long speech, so by the time I was done, it was pretty safe to go back upstairs and survey the possible damage. I don't know if I fully explained how I got into this little foray into speeches? It's kind of a winding road. It started with love letters. I do a lot of scanning of civil war correspondence, the majority of which are love letters. Sometimes happy, sometimes sad, sometimes I wonder how the woman took the tone when the soldier is upset and saying things like, 'Well, at least I will keep my end of the bargain and write to you, although you seem to have stopped writing to me.' In which the reply is usually something like, "I write you every day and am sad to hear you haven't received my letters." And all is forgiven for about a month until it starts up again and somebody gets ticked off that they aren't getting written to as frequently as they are writing to the other person. Anyway, I enjoy the work and went to the library to see what they had as far as books on love letters and sure enough they had some, which were interesting/cute/sad/funny but I discovered that pretty much all love letters can be categorized into a few categories: new infatuation, sentimental love, nostalgia, and pure meanness. No matter the time period, and no matter if the person was famous or not, people pretty much write quite similar love letters to other people. It's interesting. People don't really change much in the essentials. So, after I exhausted the love letter area of the library, I tried poetry, but I just can't ever get into that very much. So I moved toward speeches. And here I am, reciting Robespierre's terror speech in my basement at 3:30 in the morning during the loudest hailstorm I've ever experienced.