according to whom?

courtesy of the new york times (but please don't quote me on that)

Falser Words Were Never Spoken

By BRIAN MORTON

IN a coffee shop not long ago, I saw a mug with an inscription from Henry David Thoreau: “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined.”

At least it said the words were Thoreau’s. But the attribution seemed a bit suspect. Thoreau, after all, was not known for his liberal use of exclamation points. When I got home, I looked up the passage (it’s from “Walden”): “I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

Now Thoreau isn’t quite saying that each of us can actually live the life we’ve imagined. He’s saying that if we try, we’ll come closer to it than we might ordinarily think possible. I suppose that the people responsible for the coffee mug would say that they’d merely tweaked the wording of the original a little. But in the tweaking, not only was the syntax lost, but the subtlety as well.

Gandhi’s words have been tweaked a little too in recent years. Perhaps you’ve noticed a bumper sticker that purports to quote him: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” When you first come across it, this does sound like something Gandhi would have said. But when you think about it a little, it starts to sound more like ... a bumper sticker. Displayed brightly on the back of a Prius, it suggests that your responsibilities begin and end with your own behavior. It’s apolitical, and a little smug.

Sure enough, it turns out there is no reliable documentary evidence for the quotation. The closest verifiable remark we have from Gandhi is this: “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. ... We need not wait to see what others do.”

Here, Gandhi is telling us that personal and social transformation go hand in hand, but there is no suggestion in his words that personal transformation is enough. In fact, for Gandhi, the struggle to bring about a better world involved not only stringent self-denial and rigorous adherence to the philosophy of nonviolence; it also involved a steady awareness that one person, alone, can’t change anything, an awareness that unjust authority can be overturned only by great numbers of people working together with discipline and persistence.

When you start to become aware of these bogus quotations, you can’t stop finding them. Henry James, George Eliot, Picasso — all of them are being kept alive in popular culture through pithy, cheery sayings they never actually said.

My favorite example of the fanciful quotation is a passage that’s been floating around the Internet for years. It’s frequently attributed to Nelson Mandela, the former South African president, and said to be an excerpt from his 1994 inaugural address.

“Our deepest fear,” the passage goes, “is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. ... As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Picture it: Mr. Mandela, newly free after 27 years in prison, using his inaugural platform to inform us that we all have the right to be gorgeous, talented and fabulous, and that thinking so will liberate others. It’s hard to imagine it without laughing. Of course, it turns out it’s not actually an excerpt from this or any other known address of Mr. Mandela’s. In fact, the words aren’t even his; they belong to a self-help guru, Marianne Williamson.

Thoreau, Gandhi, Mandela — it’s easy to see why their words and ideas have been massaged into gauzy slogans. They were inspirational figures, dreamers of beautiful dreams. But what goes missing in the slogans is that they were also sober, steely men. Each of them knew that thoroughgoing change, whether personal or social, involves humility and sacrifice, and that the effort to change oneself or the world always exacts a price.

But ours is an era in which it’s believed that we can reinvent ourselves whenever we choose. So we recast the wisdom of the great thinkers in the shape of our illusions. Shorn of their complexities, their politics, their grasp of the sheer arduousness of change, they stand before us now. They are shiny from their makeovers, they are fabulous and gorgeous, and they want us to know that we can have it all.

Brian Morton, the director of the graduate program in fiction at Sarah Lawrence College, is the author of the novels Starting Out in the Evening and Breakable You

 

Courtesy of The NY Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/30/opinion/falser-words-were-never-spoken.html?smid=fb-nytimes&WT.mc_id=OP-SM-E-FB-SM-LIN-FWW-083011-NYT-NA&WT.mc_ev=click

c'est si bon

. . . people say that in France, we know, but they say it in Oregon too when they catch this view of Mt Shasta . . .

starry night

photography tip

just read that light entering the eyepiece affects the in-camera metering. hmph. that helps.

worlds collide

awe-struck by the choreography and costuming of king henry iv part ii production by the oregon shakespeare festival, it occurred to me that there is much in common with kabuki.

then saw this article from wsj in 2009 indicating that kabuki & shakespeare developed at the same time.

Shakespeare Meets Kabuki


Yukio Ninagawa's London Production of 'Twelfth Night' Blends Western Theater With Traditional Japanese Style.
By PAUL SHARMA

Shakespeare productions in London by Japanese classical director Yukio Ninagawa are scarce enough. This time, the rarity is compounded, as the new work is a one-off collaboration between the director and one of Japan's leading Kabuki theater groups.

Until now, Mr. Ninagawa's productions mixed Western conventions with Kabuki styles and imagery, but in this production he has worked directly with Kabuki actors for the first time. While maintaining the genre's strict conventions, he has added new features such as Western-style perspective staging and new sound effects.

Theatre until March 28: a production of Shakespeare's darkly comedic "Twelfth Night," performed by the Shochiku Grand Kabuki Theatre.

The lead performers are the Kabuki stars Onoe Kikugoro VII and his son Onoe Kikunosuke V, who grew up within Kabuki's hereditary system, joining the troupe and beginning their training at an early age. The production is also a departure for the Kabuki theater group, which normally performs a traditional repertoire of plays that were written mainly in the Edo (1603-1868) and Meiji (1868-1912) periods.

The result of this collaboration is being performed in London's Barbican "Coriolanus," the last Ninagawa production seen in London, used multiple fast-sliding Japanese screens to catch and reflect that society's mercurial moods and changing power dynamics. The production before that, "Pericles," depicted a neo-classical world, with water slowly dripping out of bamboo pipes into pools, adding to a sonic backdrop of resonating wooden flutes. The look and feel of the productions is so distinctive that in Japan the rich visual style and its dynamic group work is known as the "Ninagawa aesthetic."

While Kabuki uses flat panels to create a horizontal backdrop -- which Mr. Ninagawa believes has parallels with reading a Japanese scroll -- this "Twelfth Night" uses modern visual devices such as backing the entire stage with mirrors, depicting cherry tress in full bloom and a series of arched bridges. A production that brings Kabuki's narrow staging and the stylized physical presence of its actors together with modern theater Western-style perspective and sound effects shows why Mr. Ninagawa has been called by one critic "nature's great synthesizer."

Kabuki is an all-male theater where men, known as onnagata, play the female roles. In this production, Kikunosuke plays the three roles of Sebastian, Viola and Cesario using the hayagawari (quick-change) technique to move between roles.

A quick plot refresher: Cesario is actually Viola, who has disguised herself as a man -- Sebastian is her brother. Further on in the play, Viola/Cesario gets mistaken for Sebastian. This cross-dressing follows the Elizabethan era practice of boy actors playing the female roles which allowed gender ambiguity. Normally, Sebastian and Viola/Cesario are played by two actors, but the use of hayagawari enables roles to become even more blurred than usual, emphasizing even more the play's use of mirroring and twinning.

Mr. Ninagawa was an actor for 10 years before making his debut as a director in 1969. In 1972, he founded the theater company Sakura-sha, which led the small-theater movement in Japan. He started working in the commercial theater in 1974 and his first overseas production was "Medea" in Greece in 1983. Mr. Ninagawa worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1999 directing "King Lear" in London and Stratford-upon-Avon.

We caught up with Mr. Ninagawa at the Barbican Theatre during final rehearsals for "Twelfth Night," while a small crowd was waiting at the stage door for the stars to arrive. (Translation was provided by Yuriko Akishima.)

Q: This will be the only time you will work with a Kabuki theater. Why did you choose "Twelfth Night"?

Kabuki and Shakespeare developed, more or less, at the same time. The basic structure of the stage and the theater is very similar. So I wanted to work with a good play, with universal themes. The play also needed to allow for a man playing the woman, which is a major Kabuki characteristic, which of course is present in "Twelfth Night."

Also, in Kabuki and in Shakespeare's time, an actor would play many roles. There would also have to be a large element of entertainment, which you get from hayagawari -- and like Shakespeare, the plays were aimed both at high society and the groundlings.

Q: What do you think we can learn from this high level of artifice?

My generation studied European theater and Greek plays. By contrast, Kabuki doesn't need a director -- there is a troupe leader, but no director -- that would be very anachronistic. We have denied that kind of theater for a long time while we looked overseas, but now we can look again at our own Japanese theater forms. We can have nourishment from Kabuki, we can learn from the history of the hundreds of years of this theater. But we can't change the mixture of wonderful and unchangeable things within Kabuki. For me it was like studying in a foreign country -- where the core can never be reached. I think that for young people in Japan, they see Kabuki in the same way as tourists.

Q: While you can't change Kabuki, you have added new elements to it, such as sound design. You kept it all, but added more.

You could say that I took advantage of Kabuki.

Q: Normally you improvise with the actors -- that isn't a usual Kabuki practice. How did they react when you started that process?

They responded very well and really tried hard to work with my suggestions. In Kabuki, there are many, many forms -- you could call it a toolbox -- and it was a matter of choosing the right ones and putting them together. Because they know the forms so well -- some of which I didn't understand -- they normally rehearse and put on a play in three days. So, I had plenty of brilliant toys to choose from.

Q: "Twelfth Night" was first performed in 1602 -- what was happening in Kabuki at that time?

Kabuki started around one hundred years earlier, by the river in Kyoto. Kabuki very much went on to perfect its own form, but the mixture of political statement and sexual jokes has its clear parallels to the theater of Shakespeare's time. Kabuki has a flat perspective, whereas the Barbican is a deep stage and I try to mix the two views. For that, I use mirrors to blend the two worlds together.

Q: In this production, Sebastian and Viola are played by the same actor, but have scenes where they speak to each other. The same applies to Malvolio and Feste. How do you stage that?

Part of the enjoyment of Kabuki is the quick change, which is particular to this form, and seeing the actors change character in the blink of an eye -- but some techniques are secret! A big element is entertaining the audience with the speed of technique, to trick the eye. The physical element is very important, Kabuki is not just about the text. It mixes high and low, literature and jokes.

Q: How do you feel about working in films?

I have made four films; what I liked was that you can show small details such as a running stream -- the imagery can be very delicate. This is harder to show in a theater. Pure love story films are very popular, and in one of my films I wanted to do a love story that was gritty, but the crowds didn't come.

Q: So, what is next for you?

Next year, I would like to bring [to London] a production called "Musashi," which is running in Tokyo now. It is about a samurai swordsman; it is a revenge story, about where the cycle of revenge can stop. But it is a comedy too -- with ghosts.

dandelion power

- If you blow hard on a dandelion seed head and all the seeds blow off, a wish will come true.
- If a woman blows hard on a seed head and all the seeds blow off, her lover loves only her. If seeds remain, he is not loyal.

- Blow hard on a seed head and the number of seeds left will tell you how many children you will have.

- Blow on a seed head and the number of seeds left will tell you how many years you have left.

- Blow on a seed head until all the seeds are gone. The number of puffs it took will tell you what time it is. Alternatively, blow three times on the seed head and the number of seeds left will tell the time.

- Blow on a seed head and your wish will be carried to your lover.

- If you see seeds falling off the seed head when there is no wind, rain is on the way.

- If a child picks a dandelion flower off the plant, he will wet the bed that night.

- To find out if you will be rich, put a dandelion flower under your chin, and the degree of the glow on your chin will be the degree of your financial success.

- If you rub yourself all over with dandelion flowers, you will be welcome everywhere you go and your wishes will be granted.

http://www.gardensablaze.com/HerbDandelionMag.htm

grizzly peak

At 5922 feet, and relatively few trees on its southern slope, Grizzly Peak offers an outstanding view of the Rogue Valley and the city of Ashland. The short trail to the summit passes through a mixed forest of fir and pine. On a clear day, the trail offers outstanding views of the Cascades including Diamond Peak, Mount McLoughlin, and Mt. Shasta.

beware the wild mountain cow at grizzly peak

lewis & clark

when Thomas Jefferson dispatched Lewis and Clark to find a water route across North America and explore the uncharted West, he expected they'd encounter woolly mammoths, erupting volcanoes, and a mountain of pure salt. What they found was no less surprising. See it all on our journey: journal entries, historical photos, drawings, and more. . . . http://www.nationalgeographic.com/lewisandclark/

wood duck

wood ducks migrate through Lithia Park in Ashland each fall. Some say the male wood duck is among the most beautiful birds of the world.*

*Familiar Birds of the Northwest by Harry B. Nehls

inspirational quote

Cassius from bondage will deliver Cassius.

scansion

Da-DUM
Da-DUM
Da-DUM
Da-DUM
Da-DUM

celebrate

Today is International Tiki Day so grab a little paper umbrella and some rum and . . .tiki like there is no tomorrow!

http://www.oregonlive.com/foodday/index.ssf/2011/08/portlanders_get_out_your_umbre.html#incart_mce

isihlahla saziwa ngezithelo zaso

a tree is known by its fruit

the crystal goblet

"Imagine that you have before you a flagon of wine. You may choose your own favorite vintage for this imaginary demonstration, so that it be a deep shimmering crimson in colour. You have two goblets before you. One is of solid gold, wrought in the most exquisite patterns. The other is of crystal-clear glass, thin as a bubble, and as transparent. Pour and drink; and according to your choice of goblet, I shall know whether or not you are a connoisseur of wine. For if you have no feelings about wine one way or the other, you will want the sensation of drinking the stuff out of a vessel that may have cost thousands of pounds; but if you are a member of that vanishing tribe, the amateurs of fine vintages, you will choose the crystal, because everything about it is calculated to reveal rather than to hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain.


"Bear with me in this long-winded and fragrant metaphor; for you will find that almost all the virtues of the perfect wine-glass have a parallel in typography. There is the long, thin stem that obviates fingerprints on the bowl. Why? Because no cloud must come between your eyes and the fiery heart of the liquid. Are not the margins on book pages similarly meant to obviate the necessity of fingering the type-page? Again: the glass is colourless or at the most only faintly tinged in the bowl, because the connoisseur judges wine partly by its colour and is impatient of anything that alters it. There are a thousand mannerisms in typography that are as impudent and arbitrary as putting port in tumblers of red or green glass! When a goblet has a base that looks too small for security, it does not matter how cleverly it is weighted; you feel nervous lest it should tip over. There are ways of setting lines of type which may work well enough, and yet keep the reader subconsciously worried by the fear of 'doubling' lines, reading three words as one, and so forth."

"The Crystal Goblet or Printing Should be Invisible"

from Beatrice Warde, The Crystal Goblet, Sixteen Essays on Typography, Cleveland, 1956

a perfect day

. . . for bananafish . . .

http://www.miguelmllop.com/stories/stories/bananafish.pdf

clustering illusion

similar to gambler's fallacy, clustering illusion describes the condition of thinking you can predict random events based on past experience

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering_illusion

the fourth dimension

what the dickens

Dear Kent,

Tomorrow is a very bad day for me to make a call, as, in addition to my usual office business, I have a mass of accounts to settle with Wills. But I hope I may be ready for you at 3 o'clock. If I can't be--why, then I shan't be.

You must really get rid of those Opal enjoyments. They are too overpowering:

"These violent delights have violent ends."

I think it was a father of your churches who made the wise remark to a young gentleman who got up early (or stayed out late) at Verona?

Ever affectionately,

Signature: ChD

(ChD=Charles Dickens)

Apparently "opal enjoyments" refers to the early sky. Huh? I don't get it.

an octopus

. . . of ice. Deceptively reserved and flat,

it lies 'in grandeur and in mass'
beneath a sea of shifting snow-dunes;
dots of cyclamen-red and maroon on its clearly defined
pseudo-podia
made of glass that will bend–a much needed invention–
comprising twenty-eight ice-fields from fifty to five hundred
feet thick,
of unimagined delicacy.

'Picking periwinkles from the cracks'
or killing prey with the concentric crushing rigor of the python,
it hovers forward 'spider fashion
on its arms' misleading like lace;
its 'ghostly pallor changing
to the green metallic tinge of an anemone-starred pool.'

The fir-trees, in 'the magnitude of their root systems,'
rise aloof from these maneuvers 'creepy to behold,'
austere specimens of our American royal families,
'each like the shadow of the one beside it.

The rock seems frail compared with the dark energy of life,'
its vermilion and onyx and manganese-blue interior expensiveness
left at the mercy of the weather;
'stained transversely by iron where the water drips down,'
recognized by its plants and its animals.

Completing a circle,
you have been deceived into thinking that you have progressed,
under the polite needles of the larches
'hung to filter, not to intercept the sunlight'–
met by tightly wattled spruce-twigs
'conformed to an edge like clipped cypress
as if no branch could penetrate the cold beyond its company';
and dumps of gold and silver ore enclosing The Goat’s Mirror–
that lady-fingerlike depression in the shape of the left human
foot,
which prejudices you in favor of itself
before you have had time to see the others;
its indigo, pea-green, blue-green, and turquoise,
from a hundred to two hundred feet deep,
'merging in irregular patches in the middle of the lake
where, like gusts of a storm
obliterating the shadows of the fir-trees, the wind makes lanes
of ripples.'
What spot could have merits of equal importance
for bears, elks, deer, wolves, goats, and ducks?

Pre-empted by their ancestors,
this is the property of the exacting porcupine,
and of the rat 'slipping along to its burrow in the swamp
or pausing on high ground to smell the heather';
of 'thoughtful beavers
making drains which seem the work of careful men with shovels,'
and of the bears inspecting unexpectedly
ant-hills and berry-bushes.

Composed of calcium gems and alabaster pillars,
topaz, tourmaline crystals and amethyst quartz,
their den in somewhere else, concealed in the confusion
of 'blue forests thrown together with marble and jasper and agate
as if the whole quarries had been dynamited.'

And farther up, in a stag-at-bay position
as a scintillating fragment of these terrible stalagmites,
stands the goat,
its eye fixed on the waterfall which never seems to fall–
an endless skein swayed by the wind,
immune to force of gravity in the perspective of the peaks.

A special antelope
acclimated to 'grottoes from which issue penetrating draughts
which make you wonder why you came,'
it stands it ground
on cliffs the color of the clouds, of petrified white vapor–

black feet, eyes, nose, and horns, engraved on dazzling ice-fields,
the ermine body on the crystal peak;
the sun kindling its shoulders to maximum heat like acetylene,
dyeing them white–

upon this antique pedestal,
'a mountain with those graceful lines which prove it a volcano,'
its top a complete cone like Fujiyama’s
till an explosion blew it off.

Distinguished by a beauty
of which 'the visitor dare never fully speak at home
for fear of being stoned as an impostor,'

Big Snow Mountain is the home of a diversity of creatures:
those who 'have lived in hotels
but who now live in camps–who prefer to';
the mountain guide evolving from the trapper,
'in two pairs of trousers, the outer one older,
wearing slowly away from the feet to the knees';

'the nine-striped chipmunk
running with unmammal-like agility along a log';
the water ouzel
with 'its passion for rapids and high-pressured falls,'
building under the arch of some tiny Niagara;
the white-tailed ptarmigan 'in winter solid white,
feeding on heather-bells and alpine buckwheat';
and the eleven eagles of the west,
'fond of the spring fragrance and the winter colors,'
used to the unegoistic action of the glaciers
and 'several hours of frost every midsummer night.'

'They make a nice appearance, don’t they,'
happy see nothing?
Perched on treacherous lava and pumice–
those unadjusted chimney-pots and cleavers
which stipulate 'names and addresses of persons to notify
in case of disaster'–
they hear the roar of ice and supervise the water
winding slowly through the cliffs,
the road 'climbing like the thread
which forms the groove around a snail-shell,
doubling back and forth until where snow begins, it ends.'

No 'deliberate wide-eyed wistfulness' is here
among the boulders sunk in ripples and white water
where 'when you hear the best wild music of the forest
it is sure to be a marmot,'

the victim on some slight observatory,
of 'a struggle between curiosity and caution,'
inquiring what has scared it:

a stone from the moraine descending in leaps,
another marmot, or the spotted ponies with glass eyes,
brought up on frosty grass and flowers
and rapid draughts of ice-water.

Instructed none knows how, to climb the mountain,
by business men who require for recreation
three hundred and sixty-five holidays in the year,
these conspicuously spotted little horses are peculiar;
hard to discern among the birch-trees, ferns, and lily-pads,
avalanche lilies, Indian paint-brushes,
bear’s ears and kittentails,
and miniature cavalcades of chlorophylless fungi
magnified in profile on the moss-beds like moonstones in the water;
the cavalcade of calico competing
with the original American menagerie of styles
among the white flowers of the rhododendron surmounting
rigid leaves
upon which moisture works its alchemy,
transmuting verdure into onyx.

'Like happy souls in Hell,' enjoying mental difficulties,
the Greeks
amused themselves with delicate behavior
because it was 'so noble and fair';

not practised in adapting their intelligence
to eagle-traps and snow-shoes,
to alpenstocks and other toys contrived by those
'alive to the advantage of invigorating pleasures.'

Bows, arrows, oars, and paddles, for which trees provide the
wood,
in new countries more eloquent than elsewhere–
augmenting the assertion that, essentially humane,
'the forest affords wood for dwellings and by its beauty
stimulates the moral vigor of its citizens.'

The Greeks liked smoothness, distrusting what was back
of what could not be clearly seen,
resolving with benevolent conclusiveness,
'complexities which still will be complexities
as long as the world lasts';
ascribing what we clumsily call happiness,
to 'an accident or a quality,

a spiritual substance or the soul itself,
an act, a disposition, or a habit,
or a habit infused, to which the soul has been persuaded,
or something distinct from a habit, a power'–
such power as Adam had and we are still devoid of.

'Emotionally sensitive, their hearts were hard';
their wisdom was remote
from that of these odd oracles of cool official sarcasm,
upon this game preserve
where 'guns, nets, seines, traps, and explosives,
hired vehicles, gambling and intoxicants are prohibited;

disobedient persons being summarily removed
and not allowed to return without permission in writing.'

It is self-evident
that it is frightful to have everything afraid of one;
that one must do as one is told
and eat rice, prunes, dates, raisins, hardtack, and tomatoes

this fossil flower concise without a shiver,
intact when it is cut,
damned for its sacrosanct remoteness–

like Henry James 'damned by the public for decorum';
not decorum, but restraint;
it is the love of doing hard things
that rebuffed and wore them out–a public out of sympathy
with neatness.

Neatness of finish! Neatness of finish!

Relentless accuracy is the nature of this octopus
with its capacity for fact.

'Creeping slowly as with meditated stealth,
its arms seeming to approach from all directions,'
it receives one under winds that 'tear the snow to bits
and hurl it like a sandblast

shearing off twigs and loose bark from the trees.'

Is 'tree' the word for these things
'flat on the ground like vines'?

some 'bent in a half circle with branches on one side
suggesting dust-brushes, not trees;
some finding strength in union, forming little stunted grooves
their flattened mats of branches shrunk in trying to escape'
from the hard mountain 'planned by ice and polished by the wind'–
the white volcano with no weather side;
the lightning flashing at its base,

rain falling in the valleys, and snow falling on the peak–
the glassy octopus symmetrically pointed,
its claw cut by the avalanche
'with a sound like the crack of a rifle,
in a curtain of powdered snow launched like a waterfall.'

-marianne moore

700

@700 mountain gorillas left in the wild

get some perspective

are people more afraid of doing art or doing math? dunno. the thought of being expected to do either one embarrasses me.

so you can imagine i am not running out to purchase my own copy of viewpoints: mathematical perspective and fractal geometry in art.

that said i remember being pleasantly surprised with progress made when i went through drawing on the right side of the brain, and i've always wanted to do one of her five-day courses to see if i could improve my visual perspective with the hope of improving perspective overall. so perhaps time to stop thinking about taking the class and going ahead and taking the class. there is a difference, you know.

meanwhile, just for fun, a teaser from viewpoints:

where should the next fence post go?
(hint: not at P)

fun 'n games

http://us.akinator.com/
or
http://www.psychologytoday.com/tests

portrait of a dog

cover it up

assuming the pioneers were not covering bridges for aesthetic reasons or to deliberately be charming so that future generations would
take photos and post them on blogs,

why build and maintain a cover for a bridge?

answer from coverbridges.com:

Early attempts at wooden bridge building were at the expense of an  uncovered bridge called a plank bridge. With no means to treat the wood such as pressure treated creosote as we have today, they quickly rotted and fell in. Soon they figured that they needed to cover them.

A secondary benefit of covering the bridges also aided the horses, some horses are leery of crossing a bridge especially when they can see or hear the running water beneath. By placing the floor boards close together and painting the bridge red (If one looks closely at a Parke County covered bridge. It looks much like a long barn would). It helped the horse go right through the bridge with no problems.

Another secondary benefit of a bridge being covered was for the gentlemen. During horse-and-buggy days, it was proper to court your lady in your carriage. What better place to do this outside of the watchful eyes of the public than inside a covered bridge? This gained them the title of "Kissing Bridges" for a short time.

paradise is not lost

the world was all before them,

where to choose.