Springfield (Ill.) -- Fiction; Springfield (Ill.) -- In literature; Utopias in literature
In 2018, though a pacifist, he is still militant in the aesthetic field.
He is a leader of a group of young Springfield painters, sculptors, and
architects who are always dynamiting our stagnant exhibitions with
appropriate bombs of paint. He insists it is the painting and sculpture
of his followers that make Springfield such a dazzling success. He is
still the head teacher of the Springfield Art Association which has its
headquarters at the Edwards Place on North Fifth, as of old.
His political hobby in 2018 is that we should return to the glory of the
ancient time of the unchained nations, especially, as he hears himself
say, the era of peace and good will when the Czar instituted the Hague
tribunal, and Andrew Carnegie sent out his peace lecturers. He is sent
to our local World Government prison which is built across the street
from the City and County Jails on Seventh and Jefferson Streets. He is
here locked up for emphasizing his views to the point of world-treason.
The book flies in through the walls of his cell as though those walls
were shadows, and as though the book were made of but air and sunshine,
woven together. He who is doomed to become this awful Sparrow Short
declares that the principal mandate of the volume is for the immediate
dissolution of the entire International Government. It demands a
restoration of the conditions of 1913. The mandate of the volume for the
artist is the same as for the nation. “_Live like the Sparrow. Be
yourself completely. Utter your soul, regardless of cost._” This
condition, universally accepted, will secure a real world-peace, and one
that is not hypocrisy or oppression.
It comes the turn of the Jewish boy I so much admire. He says that in
2018 he is “Rabbi Terence Ezekiel,” a rank heretic, and an old man. He
dreams of himself as being the grandson and the son of two other Rabbis
of the same name and as having a rebel congregation all his own in 2018,
of being in their estimation and that of many others, the leading
citizen of the community. His temple is on the site of the old Isador
Kanner Synagogue. He it is, who, as the leading champion of the
aggrandizement of the photoplay as a general social factor, fights his
best chum, St. Friend, when films are a public issue, because St. Friend
preaches against them from the Cathedral. No longer is his life the
slow, devious midnight-lamp technique of the pawnshop, the furtive, the
futile, the too confidential. Not his the bad street abounding in
second-hand stores and cheap rooming lofts.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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