Literature and the Contract of Eternal Society

Russell Kirk As a young man Russell Kirk traipsed over the braes of East Ayrshire, Scotland, to a tiny village with a rich history. Known to Dr. Johnson as the residence of his friend Boswell's family, the place had, by Kirk's time, little left of its former vitality. Worse, few seemed to care: there was a new cinema a few towns over, and that was, well, new, if nothing else. In this essay from 1969, Kirk argues that community decline cannot be understood - let alone reversed - without participation in the ever-threatened tradition of literary continuity.