The Southern Physical World

"There was the influence of the Southern physical world - itself a sort of cosmic conspiracy against reality in favor of romance.  The country is one of extravagant colors, of proliferating foliage and bloom, of flooding yellow sunlight, and above all perhaps, of haze….The dominant mood, the mood that lingers in the memory, is one of well-nigh drunken reverie - of a hush that seems all the deeper for the far-away mourning of the hounds and the far-away crying of the doves - of such sweet and inexorable opiates as the rich odors of hot earth and pinewood and the perfume of the magnolia in bloom - of soft languor creeping through the blood and mounting surely to the brain,,,,It is a mood, in sum, in which directed thinking is all but impossible, a mood in which the mind yields almost perforce to drift and in which nothing any more seems improbable save the puny inadequateness of fact, nothing incredible save the bareness of truth."

 ~ W. J. Cash from The Mind of the South (1941)