Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy by Gerald Stanley Lee
page 26 of 630 (04%)
page 26 of 630 (04%)
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especially an economic world. It is because even bad dreams are better
in this world than having no dreams at all that bad people so called are so largely allowed to run it. In the final and practical sense, the one factor in economics to be reckoned with is Desire. The next move in economics is going to be the statement of a shrewd, dogged, realizable ideal. It is only ideals that have aroused the wrong passions, and it is only ideals that will arouse the right ones. It will have to be, I imagine, when it comes, not a mere statement of principles, an analysis, or a criticism, but a moving-picture, a portrait of the human race, that shall reveal man's heart to himself. What we want is a vast white canvas, spread, as it were, over the end of the world, before which we shall all sit together, the audience of the nations, of the poor, of the rich, as in some still, thoughtful place--all of us together; and then we will throw up before us on the vast white screen in the dark the vivid picture of our vast desires, flame up upon it the hopes, the passions of human lives, and the grim, silent wills of men. _"What do we want?" "Where are we going?"_ In place of the literature of criticism we have come now to the literature of Desire. This literature will have to come slowly, and I have come to believe that the first book, when it comes, will be perhaps a book that does not prove anything, a book that is a mere cry, a prayer, or challenge; the story of what one man with these streetfuls of the faces of men and the faces of women pouring their dullness and pouring their weariness over |
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