The River and I by John G. Neihardt
page 23 of 149 (15%)
page 23 of 149 (15%)
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all, he has gone to work in a most plebeian, almost slave-like fashion,
turning wheels and making lights and dragging silly little trolley cars about a straggling town. Also, he hobnobs continually with a sprawling, brawling, bad-breathed smelter, as no respectable Titan should do. And on top of it all--and this was the straw that broke the back of my sentimental camel--he allows them to maintain a park on the cliffs above him, where the merest white-skinned, counter-jumping pigmy may come of a Sunday for his glass of pop and a careless squint at the toiling Titan. Puny Philistines eating peanuts and watching Samson at his Gaza stunt! I like it not. Rather would I see the Muse Clio pealing potatoes or Persephone busy with a banana cart! Encleadus wriggling under a mountain is well enough; but Enceladus composedly turning a crank for little men--he seemed too heavy for that light work. Leaning on the frame observation platform, I closed my eyes, and in the dull roar that seemed the voices of countless ages, the park and the smelter and the silly bustling trolley cars and the ginger-ale and the peanuts and my physical self--all but my own soul--were swallowed up. I saw my Titan brother as he was made--four hundred yards of writhing, liquid sinew, strenuously idle, magnificently worthless, flinging meaningless thunders over the vast arid plain, splendidly empty under sun and stars! I saw him as La Verendrye must have seen him--busy only at the divine business of being a giant. And for a moment behind shut eyes, it seemed very inconsequential to me that cranks should be turned and that trolley cars should run up and down precisely in the same place, never getting anywhere, and that there should be anything in all that tract but an austere black eagle or two, and my own soul, and my Titan brother. When I looked again, I could half imagine the old turbulent fellow |
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