Millikin University - Millidek Yearbook (Decatur, IL)

Page 11 text:

Foreword Perhaps some of us may object to being shadows. It IS rather annoying; being classified as a shadow when we have always considered ourselves a very definite reality. Yet there is a reality in Millikin for which we, with our chiffon scarfs and Greek letters and organized clubs, are only very pale and very imperfect Shadows. It is comforting that we are all shadows together; faculty and students, conservatory and clubs, athletes and fraternities — all more or less pale, more or less imperfect. Yet, pale and imperfect as we may be, there is much of fascination in our own blue or silver outlines. And so the Millidek of 1927 has given over half of its pages to Millikin Shadows. But sometimes, in the stroke of a crayon, in the sharp saltiness of satire, or in the music of a long limpid cadence, we come close to the Reality. This year the Millidek has taken some of these near-to-reality moments and built of them a second section. This new plan of division represents, too, a Pilgrimage . . . not of yellow- robed Hindus nor of Spanish ships-of -ivory . . . but a Pilgrimage from the Shadoivs to Reality. For at first the sun was so very bright and the Thing Itself so ivhitely translucent that the Shadoivs stood out black and dominant and we hailed THEM as our Mecca; classes, teams, fraternities, all the various standards and organizations, became the center of our in- terest. But later (it was on in the afternoon of our Pilgrimage and the sun was not nearly so brilliant) we saw them as faint and flickering shadows, lovely often, but still only the shadows of what we were traveling toivard. And what are we traveling toward? . . . Why, perhaps our Pilgrimage, like Tagore ' s, is to no country and to no end.