Be the first to comment on this book.
Excerpt from Beyond DesireNeil bradley wrote letters to his friend Red Oliver. Neil said he was going to marry a woman in Kansas City. She was a revolutionist and Neil did not know when he first met her whether he was quite one or not. He said: It's like this, Red. You remember the empty feeling we had when we were in school together. I don't think you had it much when you were out here, but I did. I had it all the time I was in college and after I came home. I can't talk to Father and Mother about it much. They wouldn't under stand. It would hurt them. I guess, Neil said, that all of us younger men and women with any life in us have it now. Neil spoke in his letter of God. That was a bit strange, Red thought, coming from Neil. He must have got that from his woman. We can't hear His voice or feel Him in the land, he said. He thought perhaps the earlier men and women in America had something he and Red had missed. They had God, whatever that had meant to them. The early New Englanders, who had been so intellectually domi nant and who had in?uenced so much the thought of the whole country must have thought they had God really. If they had, what they had, it had come down to Neil and Red in some way pretty much weakened and washed out. Neil thought that. Religion, he said, was now an old gown, grown thin and with all the colors washed out of it. People still wore the old gown but it did not warm them any more.
