The darkness of ignorance
Came across this book in an antique shop I visited on a walk down the strip with some friends on Saturday. I fell in love with a straight-back chair upholstered in garish hot pink velvet ($95) but I left the store with The Right to be Happy ($4) copyright 1927. There’s not a ton of intelligence on the Web about this work, which seems to be out of print. The author, Dora Russell, was a British feminist socialist and an advocate for suffrage and available birth control. In other words… my kind of gal.
Here’s a particularly rousing passage:
Away with hypocrisies, timidities, doubts. Away with the darkness of ignorance.
Let those men and women who know, who enjoy, and who are unafraid, open the prison gates for the rest of mankind. Let them teach and live, conquer public opinion, show that they can do better than those that traffic in the old wares of superstition and of hate.
These feed upon destruction and despair, but they shall flourish on security and peace. Let such men and women build a human society in the image of human beings, vivid, warm, and quick with animal life, intricate and lovely in thought and emotion.
Let this society have the natural grace and agility of an uncorseted body whose form springs from the play of living muscles, whose deftness and sure purpose arises from thought and action closely intertwined. Such a society, by virtue of its inner resilience, would have no need to meet danger, disease, and death with the external makeshifts of war, remedial artifice, and trumpery fables.
Such a society, like the human beings that composed it, would be at home in the world, not fearing change but perpetually developing in suppleness and wisom, perpetually devising new forms and new sources of delight.
Hmmm… couldn’t have said it any better myself!
