I take that phrase, “after times,” from Walt Whitman’s 1871 treatise Democratic Vistas. For Whitman, out of the ashes of the Civil War emerged a nation bustling with the energy of commerce, “endowed with a vast and more and more appointed body” but “with little or no soul.” In this context, national rage and fury served as warning signals that were “invaluable for after times.” The phrase refers, at once, to the disruption and the splintering of old ways of living and the making of a new community after the fall. The after times characterize what was before and what is coming into view. On one
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