Springfield (Ill.) -- Fiction; Springfield (Ill.) -- In literature; Utopias in literature
The Christian Science Reader says she sees my face in the Sunday morning
Christian Science congregation of her vision. We are one and all given
new names. Her name in 2018 is Rachel Madison, and, though I am not of
her faith today, in the new time I have grown toward this light, and she
sees me with my unfortunate yellow hair and my iron cane, for all the
world as the young pawnbroker does, but sitting in the back of the
Christian Science temple listening attentively, Sunday after Sunday. She
says that it is a silver book that we see upon the great day of November
1st, 2018. It sheds an ineffable white light, it is almost as impalpable
as a comet in the sky, yet a substance that comes flying through the
walls as though they were but gleaming shadows. The air is filled with
music from all the high heavens. The book spreads six wings, like those
of celestial swans. The pages have no illuminations or other abominable
traces of the Gothic.
The book circles above the ecstatic and transfixed assembly, then it
settles upon the desk between the two older books there, and in its
presence they become like itself, books of air.
And so she reads to the people, with the other reader, who stands beside
her according to old custom. They read as though by long understanding,
but actually led as in a trance, through alternate pages of the three
books.
Almost in a day the church is rebuilt. It becomes a tremendous white
dome, a house of devotion, where the whole city worships as one soul.
Then begins the one new evolution of the town toward healing, and the
peace of the clear sky.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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