Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Joan Didion (1968)
“We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Click Book Cover for a PDF of the Text
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Click Book Cover for a PDF of the Text
The Second Coming
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Overarching Thematic Question for This Reading
The New Journalism: To what extent does our need to view things subjectively meets our human need to make sense of things coming undone?
The Socratic Seminar Prompts For the Following Selected Read Aloud Passages
Other Read-Aloud Passages
Socratic Seminar #1: pg.
Socratic Seminar #4: pg.
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Socratic Seminar #2: pg.
Socratic Seminar #5: pg.
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Socratic Seminar #3: pg.
Socratic Seminar #6: pg.
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The Reading Schedule
Socratic Seminar #1: pg.
Socratic Seminar #4: pg.
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Socratic Seminar #2: pg.
Socratic Seminar #5: pg.
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Socratic Seminar #3: pg.
Socratic Seminar #6: pg.
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