Tuesday, November 25, 2008

The Mass of Men

"Titus Alden was one of that vast company of individuals who are born, pass through and die out of the world without ever quite getting any one thing straight. They appear, blunder, and end in a fog...Titus was a farmer because his father had been a farmer. And he was here on this farm because it had been willed to him and because it was easier to stay here and try to work this than it was to go elsewhere. He was a Republican because his father before him was a Republican and because this county was Republican. It never occurred to him to be otherwise. And, as in the case of politics and his religion, he had borrowed all his notions of what was right and wrong from those about him. A single serious, intelligent or rightly informing book had never been read by any member of that family - not one. But they were nevertheless excellent, as conventions, morals and religions go - honest, upright, God-fearing and respectable."

An American Tragedy
Theodore Dreiser

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