The historians who have tried to crack the alabaster mystery that is Lee and unveil some complicated mechanism whirring deep within have succeeded only in shattering their own theories. They keep running up against the serenity of the man and the myth, and can't be sure which is which, or even if there is a difference.

Once fluency has replaced deliberation, and deconstruction supplanted simplicity, of course Lee would become a mystery. His motives seem inexplicable in this time because he explained them so simply in his own: duty, honor, country. (His country was not even the South but Virginia - a concept of loyalty beyond the mobile, modern bicoastal mind.)

Lee's was but the code of the gentleman. But who now can remember what a gentleman was? Therefore we conclude that there never really was such a thing. We assume there had to be some self-interest in Lee, and that we can find it if we just keep chipping away at the marble man. Shard by shard, we will yet explain him, until his spell lies shattered into a hundred different pieces. Instead, it is we who are shattered, revealed as incomplete, broken and, worse, unaware of it.

Modernity, which is another name for the American experience, is incapable of seeing wholeness. And it is his wholeness that explains Lee's emotion without sentimentality, his mythology without fictiveness.

Lee did not exult in victory or explain in defeat. At Chancellorsville, arguably the most brilliant victory ever achieved by an American commander, his thoughts seemed only of the wounded Jackson. As if he understood that losing Jackson would be to lose the war, that nothing would be the same afterward. At Appomattox, he was intent on the best terms he could secure for his men. His own fate did not seem to concern him except for the ways in which it might affect others - his family, his countrymen, the next generation. From beginning to end, his circumstances changed, but he remained the same. And does yet.

If the South is more than a geographic designation, if there is still a South worthy of the name, it is because myth continues to shape her, and Southerners may still be able to imagine what it is to be whole, all of a piece.

When Flannery O'Connor was asked why Southerners seem to have a penchant for writing about freaks, she would say: Because in the South we are still able to recognize a freak when we see one. To do that, one must have some idea of what wholeness would be. In these latitudes, the idea of wholeness has a name: Lee.