The Southern Gothic ethos is one bathed in blood, melancholy, and an immunity to modernity.
It was born in the South’s defeat by their own blood brothers in a war that was both civil and not.
This ethos gave America a canon of literature, poetry, and plays that have defined key attributes of not only the South but America entirely: sorrowful decline due to the shortcomings of fallen mankind.
The lifespan of this movement is at its end, yet what came before it is what is closest to eternal in America.
To move to the South is to inevitably adopt Southern pleasantries, affinities for all things gentile, and a slow, steady way of life the roots of which are traditionally English.
The Southern Gothic ethos will die soon, and a founding myth will be required to move forward both as something rooted in the everlasting and something new.
Greece: The Iliad
Rome: The Aeneid
England: Paradise Lost
Virginia: “A Country Squire’s Notebook”
The Blood & Rain Podcast:
Episode 71
“A Country Squire’s Notebook”
Featuring: Paul Fahrenheidt