Gratitude

This archive itself is the story of all those whom I am grateful to. I have had occasion to write tributes for the five individuals in this set, my wife, Ruth Woll, my friend Bruce Thomas, my friend John Franklin, who died today, March 12, 2026, Jonathan Z. Smith, my teacher, and Phyllis Cunningham, my friend.

In our wedding rings, sixty-three years ago, Ruth and I had inscribed the words, “heirs together of the grace of life.” Four more individuals must be named: our daughter, H. Roz Woll, our son, Arthur Woll, his wife, Laura Free, and our granddaughter, Lucy.

The bonds and connections and networks of these nine individuals reach out and represent an untold common heritage of the past – common to all of the peoples of the earth. As a citizen of “the West” I am grateful to Josephine Quinn for her account of How the World Made the West: A 4,000 Year History, published in 2024, which helps “us” recognize that we, too, belong to the earthlings.

On the wall of the British grade school I attended in Eldoret, from grades two through eight, was a plaque with the words, “The world is so full of a number of things, I wish we could all be as happy as kings” I used to wonder at it. I assumed it was from the Bible. I didn’t bother to take the trouble to find out that Robert Louis Stevenson was the author.

Countless other names could be added to the cloud of witnesses I have named in this archive. I can’t resist calling attention a few: Mehrsa Baradaran, Vincent Wimbush, Avery Gordon, W.E.B.DuBois, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Mehrsa Baradaran, is a legal scholar, author of the 2025 book, The Quiet Coup: Neoliberalism and the Looting of America. Baradaran is also the author of The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap (2017). Vincent Wimbush, Avery Gordon, represent a new generation taking up the banner of W.E.B. DuBois. Also, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, (1999), cognitive scientists who, I suggest, recognize that the soul is the battlefield (See pp. 423, and 563-64 of Philosophy of the Flesh, on the word “soul.” Two of Bruno Latour’s final publications must also be mentioned. If We Lose the Earth, We Lose Our Souls¸ [2022] 2024, and his 2018 book, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime are weapons of the soul in the war for the soul of planetary life.

            Martin Rudwick, The New Science of Geology: Studies in the Earth Sciences in the Age of Revolution, published in 2004 is indispensable on the ideological “war” over the earth sciences (p. 29), a war of ideas, which is a war of the soul and heart. See also his explorations of Cognitive Styles of Geology: Essays on the Sociology of Perception (2023), and his Scenes from Deep Time: Early Pictorial Representations of Deep Time: Early Pictorial representations of the Prehistoric World, (1992), and Barry Lynn’s Liberty from All Masters – these all develop the idea that the “weapons” of this warfare are those named by Majorie Kelly.