“We both belong to the race that knows Joseph, as Cornelia Bryant would say.”
“The race that knows Joseph?” puzzled Anne.
“Yes. Cornelia divides all the folks in the world into two kinds– the race that knows Joseph and the race that don’t. If a person sorter sees eye to eye with you, and has pretty much the same ideas about things, and the same taste in jokes–why, then he belongs to the race that knows Joseph.”
“Oh, I understand,” exclaimed Anne, light breaking in upon her.
“It’s what I used to call–and still call in quotation marks `kindred spirits.’”
“Jest so–jest so,” agreed Captain Jim. “We’re it, whatever it is. When you come in tonight, Mistress Blythe, I says to myself, says I, `Yes, she’s of the race that knows Joseph.’ And mighty glad I was, for if it wasn’t so we couldn’t have had any real satisfaction in each other’s company. The race that knows Joseph is the salt of the airth, I reckon.”
- passage from 'Anne's House of Dreams' by L.M.Montgomery
I did not have the faintest idea why L.M.Montgomery calls kindred souls as 'The Race That Knows Joseph , but it sounded so right, that i did a bit of research on it on the internet and a quote from the bible turned up;
Exodus 1:8 gives the moment in time that Israel ceased its period of comfort in Egypt, while under Joseph’s rule with the Pharaoh. “Now there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph.” So, the reverse being that those who were believers in God, who followed Him, were of the group that “know Joseph”.
So the Race Who Knows Joseph shared the same ideals, thoughts and beliefs. It is so perfect to describe those people, whom you meet when you least expect it, who are so like you. Those who think like you, talk like you (want to), act like you(really wanted to) and in whole embodies so many things that you stand for without realizing that you did until you met them.
There are certain signals that alert your 'social antennae', when you meet this race that knows Joseph; like finishing a sentence the same way that you just put together in your head, the glint of their eyes that mirrors your own and all the small similar things that you antenna picks up and magnifies for you. That instinctive feeling of kinship and relief.
I guess it can be explained as a primodial feeling, an instinctive mechanism of survival, where 'birds of the same feather' did flock together to survive. But for whimsical creatures of emotion like me, it is a sort of magic. A magic which binds the human race, a tenuous suggestion of a bond surpassing the biological, geological and the innate. It goes beyond the primordial and the inherited, it offers a tantalizing glimpse of achievable divinity the wise men talk about.
Am I reading too much into something that is as basic as the third tier of Maslow's pyramid or the profoundness of belonging to the class, who is simply ' the salt of the airth'...
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