Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy by Gerald Stanley Lee
page 47 of 630 (07%)
page 47 of 630 (07%)
![]() | ![]() |
|
stones give no sign. One never stops to read an epitaph on one of them;
one knows it would not be interesting, or really whisper to one the strange, happy, human things of another world--even of this world, that make the old tombstones such good company and so friendly to us. One gives a glance at the stone and passes on. It was made by machinery, apparently; a machine might have designed it, a machine might have died and been buried under it. One looks beyond it at all the others like it--all the glib, competent-looking white stones. Were the silenced people all machines under them, all mechanical, all made to a pattern like their stones, like these strangely hard, brief tombstones standing here at their heads, summing up their lives before us curtly, heartlessly, on this gentle old hillside? I wondered. I looked back to the old eloquent cemetery that almost seemed to be breathing things, and looked once more at the new. And as I stood and thought, they seemed to me to be two worlds--one the world the people all about me are always saying sadly is going by, and the other--well, the one we will have to have. * * * * * As I look off from the hilltop at the great sloping countryside about me, which stretches miles and miles, with its green fields, and bushy treetops, its red roofs, its banners of steam from twenty railways, its huge, grim, furious chimneys, its still, sleepy steeples, I also see two worlds, the same two worlds over again that I saw in the churchyard, except that they are all jumbled together--the complacent, capable, |
|