Ursuline Academy - Yearbook (Cumberland, MD)

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Ev? 'isis Basketball Achievement Senior Class Officers lielcgincs to Mission Convention at limmitslnurg Ieancttc Raphcl-CJraioriczal Contestant lclzi Santoru- Delegate to National Mission Convention, Rochester, New York. Class ol '41

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Why Some Books Never Die Have you ever stopped to think what has become of all the books that have been written during the thousands ol' years since people learned to read and write? The Assyr- ians and liabylonians wrote thousands of books on baked clay cylinders and tablets. The Egyptians and their neighbors wrote libraries of hooks on papyrus. A few of these are kept as curiosities in museums, but no one reads them now. Out of all the literature of the past. only a handful has suriivedfbut that handful has been read by an increasing number of people as the centuries come and go. This is the Literature that never grows old. NVhat is there about it that gives it such long life? More people are reading Davids Psalms today than erer sang them when he was alive. The Proverbs ol' Solomon are more used today than they were three thousand years ago. Shakespeare's plays are still read and played in the theatre, while the work ol' most dramatists of his day no longer interest us. l,incoln's Gettysburg Address is remem- hered, while the long and flowery speech which lidward Exerett delivered the same dav is forgotten. Many things combine to produce great literature, but the one quality it must always possess is that of sincerity, which is only another name for truth. ln other words it must portray or reveal truthfully the emotions, the hopes, the doubts and the iaith that have always existed in the heart of man.

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Why Literature Shall Not Go VALENTINE LONG, O. F. M. What sounds like 'an exaggeration need not be one. It may only prove the hastiness of those who, hearing, have judged it so. A man born blind might easily doubt the glory of a sunset as told to him, on the grounds of too good to be true. Yet could he but open his eyes for a moment to the splendor of the fact, he not unlikely would change his mind. He might then consider the description all of a sudden not good enough to be true. And so with the following statement. It runs the risk of sounding like big talk and, knowing this, falls shyly back upon an apology. But apology notwithstanding, this is the truth, that any school taking the Catholic religion seriously cannot afford for that very reason to make of English Literature a side issue. For that literature is nothing less than the authentic voice of human nature, speaking its purest English, and yearning its way through the hundred and one mysteries of life- whither?-to whom? Simply, it is language at its bestgone on a search for the Answer, and either--with the aid of divine revelation-finding that Answer fGodj or without that aid meeting with disappointment. It enjoys, to be sure, the free will to accept for not to acceptj the guidance of Christianity and have the light of heaven let down upon its path, but in either choice it indicates from its wild and beautiful insatiable dreams, which grow out of the very realities of experience, that man does want something better than this earth for a home. lt is a reaching for the stars, a cry in exile from the broken heart of humanity. And although it is true the masterpieces of our language, in an overwhelming majority, have about them the clean fresh air of Christianity, nevertheless a Catholic might very conceivably accuse that atmosphere of the taint of heresy. He might feel so inclined, but hardly if he had made a study of the classics in question. For the scholar would know how the religion of England, once separated from the Papacy, soon cracked up into all sorts of divisions, and that as a result the literary spokesmen of the nation avoided the differences of the multiplying sects to concentrate on those grand central doctrines from the Mother Church, still kept intact, and still held in common. Only the Catholic writers as a Chris- tian group, by way of exception, chose to venture doctrinally into detail, and their number, negligible for three centuries, has grown steadily out of the daybreak of the Oxford move- ment to the brilliance of an unquenchable sunrise. For the most part, Catholic or Protestant, they were men and women of Christlike ideals who wrought the emotions and dreams of the race into an immortal English beauty of mere words. And they cannot receive too much credit. But strangely enough it is the pagan minority, when not downright hostile, that has been known to carry more telling weight towards the confirmation of Catholic truth, in the minds of youth. And for this reason: it bears witness from without and in spite of itself. By contrast, its sadness without hope betrays it. Its rejection of divine revelation cannot stand the test. It cries out from the unfathomable depths of experience for it-knows-not-what. But a Catholic teacher knows, and it is his business to point out to the class any such unconscious act of faith. From the list of examples available, the Ode to the Nightingale will have to suffice. It is typical of the rest, poetry and prose alike. Here the poet Keats following the promptings of his better self reaches unaware a magnificent agreement with St. Augustine and St. Paul. Under the spell of beauty, when the silence of moonlight has taken voice and mingles music with radiance of the night, really in a blending as perfect as that of the fragrance and color of a flower, or the color and innocence in a child's eye, or the red warmth of a human kiss, under the spell of such