Читать книгу The Goslings: A Study of the American Schools онлайн

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Bear with me a moment. All about us yawns the pit of mediocrity. With few exceptions, the men and women and the sweet boys and girls I meet jade on me. It is appalling—their unlovely spirit—mediocrity. They are without greatness, without camaraderie, never do much of anything that is virile and stinging and resentful, nor ever feel the prod and urge of life to will over its boundaries and be devilish and daring. I can see through them and beyond them, and all there is to see is their frailty, their meagerness, their sordidness and pitifulness. They are miserable little egotisms, like all the other little humans, fluttering their May-fly dance of an hour. As far as we are concerned in the matter they can go hang. We laugh at the ridiculous effrontery of their efforts to crystallize us in the particular mold of their two-by-two, cut-and-dried, conventional world.

Don’t you see? Beyond all of us and the spirit of us that is a-bubble whispers Romance, Adventure. We have read the books and are aflame with purple hints of a world beyond our world. When the week-ends roll around, we want to do novel and stirring things, we want to realize ourselves, to chance and boast and dare, to put laughter in our throats, and quicken the throb of our blood. Heavens! We have considered and counseled a myriad times, and the only conclusion we reached was that we were as abysmally ignorant of life as we were or thought we were profoundly wise.