March 17, 2010

Dear Friends,

Local currencies are designed to encourage trade at locally owned
businesses. At the same time their very design can reflect and honor the
history and culture or an area. This is true of BerkShares.

On the 20 BerkShare note, for example, you find Herman Melville, novelist,
essayist, poet, and mariner. Melville is best known as the author of one of
the greatest of all American novels, “Moby Dick” (1851). Written at his
Arrowhead farmhouse in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, it places Melville amongst
a prestigious host of literary figures to emerge from the Berkshire area.

An excerpt from “Moby Dick” follows, capturing its universal appeal.

This Saturday at 7PM, author and historian David Boyle, a senior fellow at
the New Economics Foundation of London, will speak for BerkShares. The
title of his talk is “Money Changers: Local Currencies and the New
Economics.” David will draw from his experience with a number of British
towns that have replicated BerkShares for their communities. Please join us
at the First Congregational Church of Stockbridge to welcome David Boyle.
Admission is 5 BerkShares or $5.

Best wishes,

The BerkShares Team

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In the passage below Melville, as the narrator, has just praised the
character of Starbuck, the first mate. But Melville anticipates that
Captain Ahab's madness will ultimately dominate even Starbuck's best self
and this man of valor will lose courage to stand for what is right in face
of the stronger personality. Melville is reluctant to show this weakness in
Starbuck. He debates this in the passage.

“ . . . it is a thing most sorrowful, nay shocking, to expose the fall of
valor in the soul. Men may seem detestable as joint stock-companies and
nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be; men may have mean and
meager faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a
grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his
fellows should run to throw their costliest robes. That immaculate
manliness we feel within ourselves, so far within us, that it remains intact
though all the outer character seem gone; bleeds with keenest anguish at the
undraped spectacle of a valor-ruined man. Nor can piety itself, at such a
shameful sight, completely stifle her upbraidings against the permitting
stars. But this august dignity I treat of, is not the dignity of kings and
robes, but that abounding dignity which has no robed investiture. Thou
shalt see it shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike; that
democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God;
Himself! The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all
democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!”

Rather amazing this sentiment at a time in our political history where
commentators vie to criticize the character of a leader rather than let
shine the best. But it is a true sentiment to our own inner impulses -- we
are happier when we can praise and rejoice in the noble in each other.