Quotation from: The Valley of the Moon

Written by: Jack London


Billy took little interest in the many discussions waged in
Hall's big living room. "Wind-chewin'," was his term for it. To
him it was so much good time wasted that might be employed at a
game of Pedro, or going swimming, or wrestling in the sand.
Saxon, on the contrary, delighted in the logomachy, though little
enough she understood of it, following mainly by feeling, and
once in a while catching a high light.


But what she could never comprehend was the pessimism that so
often cropped up. The wild Irish playwright had terrible spells
of depression. Shelley, who wrote vaudeville turns in the
concrete cell, was a chronic pessimist. St. John, a young
magazine writer, was an anarchic disciple of Nietzsche. Masson, a
painter, held to a doctrine of eternal recurrence that was
petrifying. And Hall, usually so merry, could outfoot them all
when he once got started on the cosmic pathos of religion and the
gibbering anthropomorphisms of those who loved not to die. At
such times Saxon was oppressed by these sad children of art. It
was inconceivable that they, of all people, should be so forlorn.

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