Lanterna Rally

Author: Edward Earle Purinton

Publisher: Forgotten Books

Published: 2017-09-17

Total Pages: 134

ISBN-13: 9781528476836

Excerpt from The Philosophy of Fasting They endure only when cemented by feeling and aligned by purpose. The field of literature is mostly a dreary brick-yard, with chipped and broken bits scattered about to mark what might have been had the builder known. Life is the only literature that lives. And if I had not first lived this book, it would never be worth the writing. To write for any other reason than that one mast is to insult oneself and to martyr one's friends. If you write only when you must, you may not always be considerate to your friends. But you will at least be true to yourself. And the perusal of your writings can never be too hard a price to pay for knowing some one who is sincere. Sincere humans are about as common as brave gazelles or compassionate tigers. The Philosophy of Fasting is a plea for human sincerity and a treatise on human wholeness. The first twenty-five years of my life I was anything but whole. Because I was anything but sincere. I did not dare be true to myself, or with my fellows. Civilization, classicism and orthodoxy had combined to make me appear what I was not and crucify what I was. Body, brain and soul, I was burdened with a mass of externals that weighed heavier and sunk deeper day by day, until the life was almost crushed out of me. Born a weakling, I was a semi-invalid and chronic sufferer during most of my boyhood and youth. Some fifteen forms of constitutional disease took turns troubling me; until family, friends and physicians began to despair of the outcome. At one time I was taking six kinds of medicine, weighed 110 pounds instead of 150, spent most of the time beside the fire, or on the couch, and threatened to become useless to myself and everybody else. The ailments were chiefly nervous and digestive, and were caused by inequalities of make-up. Inheriting from my father a brain incessantly active, from my mother a soulsupersensitive and a physique small and tremulous, from both an insatiable ambition; I seemed unable to balance myself at all. Wearing a man's hat at twelve, I had the body of a boy of eight, with a soul older than any I had ever met. Naturally no one understood me. And the greatest puzzle to me in the Universe was I to myself. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.