3/26/2006

Shining Tree of Life

Adam Gopnik has a nice essay in the 2/13-20/2006 issue of The New Yorker about "what the Shakers did." He writes, "Everything that they touched is breathtaking in its beauty and simplicity.... Their objects show a knowing, creative, shaping simplicity... Shaker objects don't look simple; they look specifically Shaker."

So, while I liked the essay, the point of blogging it here is this quote about Quakers:

"Yet the Shakers made specifically stylish things, where others didn't. ...[T]he Friends, apart from a general tendency toward the plain and suspicion of the fancy, had no real style separate from that of their fellow-Americans. They wore more or less the same clothes and used the same furniture as everyone else. (They just disapproved of their own use of them more than other people did.)"

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