OT OT OT
Have a wonderful NYE, Pat. Regards to Amelia Earhart.
Just for fun, here's the dinner game I've put together for tonight's festivities --- a sit-down dinner for 10. The idea is to match an opening segment with a closing segment from the following quotes. They're all classics anyone raised in an average North American school would have read and they've been chosen to stimulate conversation on where we've been and where we're going.
Tomorrow I'll post the list of titles. Don't want to spoil the fun by giving them here.
Happy New Years, everyone!!
Pat
>>>>>>
So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration.
But after I had got them out and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn't any good. It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.
In the three short decades between now and the twenty-first century, millions of ordinary, psychologically normal people will face an abrupt collision with the future.
He walks towards an imminent, self-given death? I think not; for he has at last found at atom of faith in himself, a true uniqueness, on which to build; has already begun, though he would still bitterly deny it, though there are tears in his eyes to support his denial, to realize that life, however advantageously Sarah may in some ways seem to fit the role of Sphinx, is not a symbol, is not one riddle and on failure to guess it, is not to inhabit one face alone or to be given up after one losing throw of the dice; but is to be, however inadequately, emptily, hopelessly into the city's iron heart, endured. And out again, upon the unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea.
There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings.
_______ believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter -- tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning --
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Mr. Tench went out to look for his ether cylinder, into the blazing Mexican sun and the bleaching dust A few vultures looked down from the roof with shabby indifference: he wasn't carrion yet.
A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green.
About nine o'clock on a late November morning during a thaw, the train from Warsaw was nearing Petersburg at full speed. It was so wet and foggy that there was still hardly any light, and from the train windows it was difficult to distinguish anything ten yards on either side of the tracks.
"Enough indulging our whims, it's time to be reasonable. And all this being abroad, all this Europe of yours is only a fantasy, and all of us, when we're abroad, we are only a fantasy. Mark my words, you'll see for yourself!" she concluded almost angrily, as she parted with Yevgeny Pavlovitch.
That was all; the time for splendor was past. It did not shout "Forward!" or summon men to glory. After the first thirty days of war in 1914, there was a premonition that little glory lay ahead.
In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels.
An easterly is the most disagreeable wind in Lyme Bay -- Lyme Bay being that largest bite from the underside of England's outstretched southwestern leg -- and a person of curiosity could at once have deduced several strong probabilities about the pair who began to walk down the quay . . .
He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.
"Yes," he said gently, 'My name is Father --' But the boy had already swung the door open and put his lips to his hand before the other could give himself a name.
"The road is cleared," said Galt. "We are going back to the world."
He raised his hand and over the desolate earth he traced in space the sign of the dollar.
These pages will have served their purpose if, in some measure, they help create the consciousness needed for man to undertake the control of change, the guidance of his evolution. For, by making imaginative use of change to channel change, we cannot only spare ourselves the trauma of future shock, we can reach out and humanize distant tomorrows.
It is our alarming misfortune so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth.
The light was ebbing, and Eddie Willers could not distinguish the bum's face. The bum had said it simply, without expression. But from the sunset far at the end of the street, yellow glints caught his eyes, and the eyes looked straight at Eddie Willers, mocking and still --- as if the question had been addressed to the causeless uneasiness within him.
The unusual events described in this chronicle occurred in 194___ at Oran. Everyone agreed that considering their somewhat extraordinary character, they were out of place there.
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."
Curley and Carlson looked after them. And Carlson said, "Now what the hell ya suppose is eatin' them two guys?" |
