W. Robert Connor (Photo: Kent Mullikin)

omewhere Kafka wrote that a book should be an ax to break up a frozen sea of thought. Every time I think of that comment I picture the poor fellow all alone, far out on some windswept bay, obsessively hacking away at a vast sheet of arctic ice. I want to shout to him, "Franz, just wait a bit, spring is coming and the thaw will do it for you." Oh, I take Kafka's point clearly enough and try to use it as a criterion in the selection of the fellows who come to the Center to work on their scholarly projects. But there's something to be said, too, for the other strategy, waiting until Spring and letting nature take its course.

Here's the Spring issue of Ideas, not a book or an ax, but a breath of fresh air, I hope. That, too, can let currents of thought flow more freely, or at the very least help us peer up from our immediate task and look at things in a fresh light. Dick and Nancy Lewis have certainly helped many of us at the National Humanities Center see the portraits in the National portrait Gallery in a new way by juxtaposing them with quotations from or about the subjects of those portraits. For instance, we all know of Babe Ruth and his great accomplishments on the field, but Dick and Nancy have given us a memorable image of the slugger alongside the vivid words of Red Smith, "nobody circled the bases with the same pigeon-toed mincing majesty." Away from the world of sports and into more scholarly environs, they show us Pocahontas as "an American legend" and "one of our few true native myths." In either case, we gain fresh perspective on someone who earlier may have seemed quite familiar.

Once the ice begins to break, as we see so regularly here at the Center, lively discussion and argument follows. That came home to me when I circulated an essay I had written on moral knowledge and found Fellows, friends, and Trustees arguing vigorously with me and with one another. I will not often inflict my writing on the readers of Ideas, but in this case Joe Parsons, the publication's new editor, convinced me that the discussion surrounding my piece provided a good way of conveying the liveliness of debate and discussion at the National Humanities Center. I hope readers will now join in that discussion and let me hear their reactions to this and other parts of the journal. Ideas exists to thank our many donors for their support and to document some small portion of the work our scholars produce. We know that it is serving its purpose when our friends take up the discussions that begin in these pages.

Finally, a word of welcome to our new editor, Joe Parsons, who recently moved to the Research Triangle area from Illinois, where he was an editor at the University of Chicago Press, just at the moment when this issue began to take shape. He will now wield the ax, or channel the gusts of fresh air, that shape Ideas. Welcome, Joe. We're glad to have your help.

W. Robert Connor, Director