ROSALITA
Contributors: Cover Design by Gloria Hyland; Cover Photograph by Gordon Baer
Publisher: Cultural and Educational Productions, Canada and USA
Published: 1968
Place of publication: Cincinnati, United States
Language: eng
Format: Hardbound
Number of pages: 86
Copyright date: As Unpublished Work (Canada) 1967
Subjects: Literature; East and West Culture
Genres: Post Ulysses Joycian Stream of Consciousness Writing
First sentence: Will you understand if I tell you that life is something like a bank. You can take out of it only what you put into it, nothing more, nothing less. I understand that now. But not in that long spring so far since gone. Now it might have been that the spring was real then, and I unreal like the unreal sunset of life into which I go, and the church steeple a memory or a pasteboard cut out and the farm houses and the hedgerows and at night the stars above quite unreal. Then I was real. Now they are real and I am unreal. Will you feel what I say? Will you understand the first morning call of the birds and my long legs jerking and my thin frame pulling over my head the blanket against a new day. And can you hear the heavy clop clop of the farm horses as they pull a dray in the road beyond. All that is unreal, contrived by a very real life for a young urchin soon off to school.
Description: Rosalita is a Post Ulysses Joycian Stream - Of - Consciousness Novella, expressed in words to Jack Smith of the Los Angeles Times, as an expression of a generation that has rebelled against its elders. It was written at the time of the Viet Nam War. Day told Jack Smith: "Americans are materialistic and aggressive because they had to be, to pioneer their country. When you had to drive a wagon across 1000 miles you couldn't be passive. But today your children are responsive to a more passive philosophy. The West is an external society; the East is internal, more spiritual. The East lives on the inside, the West on the outside..........I don't mean you have to have a God in Heaven, but you have to have a God inside you".It is a search of Youth searching for Itself.
Notes: Dedicated to Vera Stacey Wainwright. Logo on the preface-page is from Pascal " L'homme n'est qu'un roseau, le plus faible de la nature, mais c'est un roseau pensant.Il ne faut pas que l'univers entier s'arme pour l'ecraser. Une vapeur, une goutte d'eau, suffit pour le tuer. Mas quand l'univers l'ecraserait, l'homme serait encore plus noble que ce qui le tue, parce qu'il sait qu'il meurt, et l'avantage que l'univers a sur lui, l'univers n'en sait rien".