Word: retrospections
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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EIGHT O'CLOCK CHAPEL: A Retrospect of New England College Life of the Eighties-Cornelius H. Patton and Walter T. Field- Houghton, Mifflin ($3.50). Undergraduates of the Dashing Decade...
...Harvard reception, Mr. Pickwick as Dicken's contemporary representative will go to Craigie House, the Cambridge home of his dearly loved Longfellow. Because of the regard with which they held each other as evidenced in affectionate letters and frequent visits Mr. Pickwick will approach the shrine with humble retrospect that here, upon one glorious occasion, Dickens dined with Longfellow. Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell and Bayard Taylor...
From the mass of testimony, some bits which stand out in retrospect are: Mr. Ford. "Mr. Ford is the strangest, most perplexing combination. Take his book on Henry Ford-one chapter reveals uncanny judgment, and the next is composed of the most utter rot. He was the company's greatest asset and also the greatest risk. He insisted on policies that were untried and which were against the consolidated judgment of other men in the automobile industry. Now that he has been so successful we can see that his judgment was sound. There was the question of the life...
...What may redeem Tom is his own first sentence, the generalization: "All men are blowhards." But how far removed from Huck's amiable unmorality is all this Tom-talk of moral credit. How strange that two products of like environments should see things so differently in retrospect. How odd that Huck the outcast should write with such contentment while Tom the respected citizen has loathing in his memory and joy, strident because vicarious, only in perfections yet to be. Both the books are written for middle-aging people. Who shall say which is wiser...
...latch, the "niceness" of a family party (the only kind they ever achieve) as they are convinced of the future greatness of their stupid, bespectacled little boy, Martikins. Then, when the pipe turns up, when the latch is post-poned again, the party over, their everlasting Smithness becomes contented retrospect. Martikins emits a flash of adolescent near-greatness, marries a vivid girl, almost becomes a pianist, and the Smiths are hurt, alarmed, until the flash is extinguished. Everlasting Smithness shows now as endless piddling, now as hope eternal. It ends as everlasting Smithness, a vegetable condition as happily comfortable...