From this morning's BOSTON GLOBE:

As the nation prepares to mark the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War in 2011, with commemorations that reinforce the North/South divide, researchers are offering uncomfortable answers to that question, unearthing more and more of the hidden stories of New England slavery — its brutality, its staying power, and its silent presence in the very places that have become synonymous with freedom.

More, much more:

My third day at the Vermont Studio Center where I will be for a month. Ample time for musing which is important. Musing is to summoning the Muse as fishing is to catching fish. It is a willed and wily passivity, a passionate patience, the union of being and doing, a way of submitting wholly to the present in order to invite memory, entice the unexpected, even, by allowing the imagination to suppose this and that, guess at the future.

Musing seems to me to be the opposite of what these days too often passes for thinking: the choosing between this position and that one, the preference for this or that proffered alternative, strategies for "getting your needs met," learning how to use the pull-down menus, the brand-name solutions to discomfort, and the memes and macros that allow us to live on cruise control.