The taste of honey : $b The note book of a linguistUnderwood, Edna Worthley
History
The taste of honey : $b The note book of a linguist
Underwood, Edna Worthley
Literature -- History and criticism
The opening of the Twin Americas, Africa, meant, demanded, a
tremendous amount of practical work, exploiting; expanding technical
skill. Under progressive conquest of things material, increasing
manual dexterity, increasing technical achievement, the idealizing
spirit of a smaller world, content with fewer things for the few, was
in abeyance. Whatever happens or threatens to happen is not final. A
glimpse, if imperfect, beyond the age helps steady us. Time has no
model of perfection meant to be copied forever.
The more modern the unit of art, the more unrest, that nameless
something that disturbs. In activities of the rapid present, there
is not sufficient place for gentle things. Not all flowers bloom
best when the storms rage. But in a future, far perhaps, after the
material conquest has been carried through, there will come, I have
faith to believe, a nobler conquest, loftier. Now artists are merely
trying to explore, then map a new world. We can not travel always
upon mountains. Meadow lands have to be crossed. We can not sweep all
the new with vision at any one moment.
Wrapped in Christianity, which taught sacredness of the individual,
lay undeveloped seed of socialism, the French Revolution,
world-upheavals. At inception of new faith, no one can measure
expansion. Vast processes of change are in progress all about us
everywhere.
The restlessness in the United States has varied causes, one, the
possibility (soon to become desire) of individuals leaving the class
in which they were born. Restlessness welcomes change. Anything
different is good. It is not necessary it be better. Life is a game.
Concept is cheapened. Every small boy is given one ideal; namely, to
get out of the class in which he was born and become President. It is
like considering life as being poised upon the crest of excitement.
The object of life should be to widen the horizon of intelligence,
preserve kindness in the heart, and keep a margin of security for
comfortable living. He lives most who thinks best, not he who has the
largest accumulation of dollars, and moves about upon wheels in the
air.
The Great War was the demolishing blow to the vast, antique
structure, the marble columns of whose first falling echoed
thunderously in May, 1787, in France.
In the West there exists dramatic, political idealism; inexperience,
youth, together with lack of international outlook. In the West
there is still youth, its desire, its progress, a dream suitable
for a rich, young, unexploited country permitted for a century to
develop undisturbed. Wealth has too often become end, instead of aid
to larger living. It has habit of shrinking the horizon of the one
who possesses it. It might provide broad spaces of leisure, instead
of a mad, noisy movie program, which resembles destructive fury of
the mastodons, the monsters, when they dashed ahead to escape the
approaching ice cap. The ideal, however unrealizable, is not wasted
because it forms compensating pendant to the practical.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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