Springfield (Ill.) -- Fiction; Springfield (Ill.) -- In literature; Utopias in literature
And meantime, according to her tale, the book is there, pictured on the
screen, circling around the domes and towers of Rabbi Terence Ezekiel’s
heretical synagogue on east Mason Street. And so the Rabbi makes haste
to that place, and a few friends follow. But many people in the audience
of quite different faiths declare that those are their own church
steeples and not his temple towers, and hasten to the houses of their
belief. Which is not so strange, to one who has been in a law court, for
there it is demonstrated that a witness is somewhat apt to see and
remember what he desires to see and remember. And so each finds the book
where he has faith to find it.
The Doubter is the next member of our club to testify and he tells of
the midnight visions he has already described to me.
He is reborn as Mayo Sims, physician of all the great saints and sinners
in the town. Incidentally he is the political ally of the Rock and
Kopensky families, people obscure in 1920, since they are but tenants on
his farms, but in 2018 in the city government, along with the tribe of
Cave Man Thomas and others.
The physician tells first to me, then to the rest of the group of
forecasters, that he has seen how the book with all its chronicles and
exhortations, rituals and parables, is utterly rejected by the mass of
the citizens of the Mystic Year. They refuse to let the pages draw
conclusions for them from the past or move them with hopes for the
future. According to his tale the volume raises a faction of desperate
malcontents, whose business, beside fomenting strikes, is to sing in a
particularly nasal whine. Some of the rank and file of this group are
shot down, after the city has endured five days of hideous “racket,” and
more hideous vocal music. There is no magic ballad or hymn in the air.
There is but one copy of the book, “thanks be.” It is full of sedition,
and therefore tabooed, but dog-eared from being much passed around in
secret. To be sure it has a cheap gilt paper cover. It is captured and
carried ten miles east of the city by certain friends of law and order,
members of the Rock and Kopensky families, led by Cave Man Thomas. It is
dropped into an abandoned coal-shaft. It goes down like lead. It has no
wings. It was written by hair-brained sociologists, some of the wild
ones from the absurd University of Springfield, not by “practical
business men.”
It is not rescued, from the shaft. The writers of the work go back to
their legitimate teaching, and are heard from never again.
The Doubter goes on to give the genuine psycho-analytical data on most
of the saints of Springfield at that time. These accounts are from his
confidential records. For he treats the holy ones for all varieties of
nervous disorder, epilepsy, and the like. He is quite sure Christ and
Mohammed were epileptics, and that settles it with all such foolishness.
But perhaps you too have doubted.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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