“I couldn’t hold up my head in town…”
every man’s “spirit within him”
“It is required of every man,
that the spirit within him
should walk abroad among his fellow-men.”
spoken by Jacob Marley, in A Christmas Carol (1843) by Charles Dickens
In Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch tells his young daughter, Scout, why he is defending Tom Robinson, “a Negro” who is falsely accused of raping a white woman: “…if I didn’t I couldn’t hold up my head in town.”
I think that Jacob and Atticus forgot that men and women have to want to “walk abroad” among their fellows, and they have to want to hold up their heads for the sake of dignity and goodness and fairness.
Really, I think not enough people want to walk that way.
* * * * * *
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2022 All rights reserved.
Book review: Ethan Frome
not being satisfied with less…
by Edith Wharton
click here
–
Seeing far: Selected poems with 47 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
* * * * * *