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Ann Little and the Great Desire
and straightway thought to yourself, ‘I have said that very thing before, but not within the memory of my present life.'"’ Have you not experienced day-dreams wherein you saw clearly places and people and things that you knew full well you had never seen — in this life, yet these were as real to you for the moment as actualities of yesterday? Perhaps these subtle ways those old existences
m
crowd in upon the present, striking thru sometimes when the veil is thinly drawn.
“Have you never felt the promptings of the Great Desire? The one thing that it seemed to you was your most ardent hope on earth from the very day you began to think of things that mattered? You may say that these things are inherent from one’s forebears, that they are simply inherited predilections. But this is an insufficient explanation, to my mind. I do not believe particularly in hereditary traits. More likely, I think, desires and peculiar aptitudes are the result of the persistence of past desires and aptitudes than of those jiassed on from one generation to another. I believe in the individual persistence. One man’s thoughts and hopes and aims are his;
they are not another’s.
“I do not believe in hereditary traits,” says Miss Little; “I think desires and peculiar aptitudes are the result of the persistence of past desires and aptitudes passed on from one generation to another”
“Nothing that is worth while, nothing that is fine, or good or beautiful or right — ever is wasted, lost forever. Can we believe that the mind of
© Evans
Ann Little was in a philosophical mood, and, as any one knows, when a person is in that mood the tongue gives utterance to the unusual, or else, the very trite. But Miss Little was hot talking platitudes.
Possibly the fact that she was playing Naturitch, the ill-fated Indian maiden in “The Squaw Man,” had induced the disposition to philosophic utterance. The Indians are known to have come close to the borderland of things hidden from most of us, thru their association with nature unfettered by the bonds of civilization.
Be that as it may. Miss Little opened the way toward a consideration of transcendental topics by asserting stoutly that a worth-while desire never fails.
“What we most desire in our lifetime,” said she. “we may not always attain — in that period. But there are new lives for each of us — and some time, perhaps in the dawn of new centuries, we will be born again, and with us that desire will be still persistent.”
“You mean,” we asked, “that you believe in reincarnation?”
She smiled. “In a sense — but I do not believe in the transmigration of the soul, if that is what you imply. I do not think we come back as dogs or cats. Or that we will remember our previous existences, save in those occasional backward flashes of memory, such as we all experience at times. Have you ever visited a city for the first time, assumably, only to feel that there are familiar thingsthere — a street corner, an old house — that you seem to know? Have you ever said a thing
(Thirtyxix)