her to prepare all the requirements of the season of parties—gowns, furs, and hats—so that she is in constant occupation, vexation, and anxiety, because she has decided to take part in the masked ball her friend will give on the occasion of her birthday, and the preparation of her costumes is not yet finished—and here is the party drawing near.
And if some occasion brings you together with the children, and you talk with the girl about her affairs and her studies, you learn that her knowledge of what goes on around her does not much exceed your knowledge of some Semitic language dead these many distant centuries. Yes—the styles of living that make some of our rich 'civilized' in the parlance of society have created of the rising generation a generation superficial in its knowledge, drowned in a sea of delusions, wrapped in a garment of flabbiness that has carried off its awareness
and its conscience, and pictured life to it in seductive images, rotten in their foundations and crooked in their ways, which have turned it aside from the road that a generation created for the right and virtuous life ought to walk.
Our young people today know every little and great thing about Hollywood, and will tell you at length of the marriage of this actress and the divorce of that one; but if you ask one of them about an event in his own history or a matter in his own country, he looks at you with disdain, and in his eyes—in which there is no trace of a glimmer of the tokens of knowledge—you glimpse all the meanings of ignorance and all the effects of the mistaken direction of modern upbringing in these crumbling houses.
I say crumbling, and I mean what I say. As I mentioned at first, there is no fear that their walls
will collapse; but the fear—all the fear—is for these families whose parts have come loose, and for these morals which today are thrown down on the gaming tables, among cronies and boon companions, in the cinema theaters and the halls of amusement, as cheap goods are thrown down for cheap sale. — This is one of the pictures of society, which I have displayed in a great house lofty of structure, inhabited by a family of vast wealth, envied by many of the deluded who look at life with a gaze far from its true meaning, and so reckon the matter happiness where it is only a mirage of happiness, and think life a living confined—as it is with some—to purely material things, whereas in its essence it is values and high ideals, deserved only by those who have schooled themselves in its lofty meaning and followed in their course a right way.
To appear on the first of March, a book
That Long Night
By Mohammed Youssef Hammoud
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Saab Adv. /16