reconcilement

And in the end they managed to convince themselves so completely that when the quake finally came, when Ann Atwater and hundreds of other poor black residents of Durham’s slums poured into the streets demanding the reconcilement of myth and history, of dream and reality, the white families who had ruled Durham like monarchs fabricated a credible display of shock, indignation, and even betrayal.

They wrote, “We watched the continual reconcilement of apparently unreconcilable things.”

We saw among the relics of the many wars South Africa has been involved in relics from the Anglo-Boer War of 1899— 1902, a colonial war so bitterly and closely fought that it left between the English and the Afrikaners wounds of mutual suspicion and hatred so deep that true reconcilement has never taken place to this day.

Yet "ideal" and "reconcilement" are scarcely the words; for Browning's philosophy, when detached, as it may be, from its context, teaches just the acceptance of life in itself as needing no conversion into something beyond its own impulsive desires: Let us not always say, "Spite of this flesh to-day I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole!"

Roughness and smoothness, Shine and defilement, Grace and uncouthness: One reconcilement.