I‘ve been influenced by the energy that writers like Henry Thoreau, William Faulkner, and Virginia Wolfe found in their impressions of things they liked or not.  Not leaving out the wisdom of Thomas Carlyle or the unique poetic contribution of William Carlos Williams or Dylan Thomas by evidence of  his epic “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night”.  But far from the more familiar prose of famous writers resides in my mind the speech delivered by King Alexander Liholiho Kamehameha IV at the dedication of the Queens Hospital in 1859 at Honolulu. Here a man of my own ethnicity and relative DNA pens in his own words a culmination of wisdom and kingship equal to any great speech ever presented not only to those who recognize him as sovereign but to the kindness of those who through fault of their own unintentionally caused the demise of the native Hawaiian, speaking plainly to the pathogens left behind that the hospital might treat, he is most concerned for the disease of prejudice of which he knew no cure save the philosophy of aloha.

Red Room