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Show 72 MADELYN CANNON STEWART SILVER "Fountain" and ate waffles while they heard stories about a classmate who, having drunk too much, drove down Salt Lake City sidewalks and was arrested. On February 28, 1924, the night before her twenty-third birthday, Madelyn wrote that she was no longer enjoying "a teeming, active, steadily on-going life. The steady continuity of my dreams has stopped. This year I am so very much alone. This year there is no really congenial, touching spirit." She felt lonely and depressed. Fearful that she was beginning to lose faith in herself, she attributed her lackluster feelings to her job; she hated school teaching. She resolved not to waste away, but "grow in splendor and fineness of character." She prayed for is stamina and strength. A week later, Madelyn reported that she had run "the entire gauntlet of moods. Thrilled and progressive the first three days; Life is funny; we are all striving so then gradually lowering earnestly and yet so blindly. Towards everything I have a sus "19 pended attitude. Warring instincts and ideals I suppose. An event occurred shortly after, in April 1924, that plunged her into a depression far deeper than any she had previously experienced. She was driving her car with some friends in downtown Salt Lake City. Suddenly, a reckless, young unli to .... censed driver sped through a stoplight and slammed into her car, killing Carol Jensen, one of Madelyn's friends, who was a passenger. Madelyn went through a period of "darkness and terror," as she described it, and even considered giving up her teaching career. That she was driving and felt responsible for the crash added to her burden. "The lilt has gone out of every thing," she wrote, "and my life feels drained and thin and unut terably ugly and useless!" BORN OF SORROW So soul is born of sorrow. Ah, dear God, Is that what has been happening to me? The agony, the lonely nights, the pain, The swift and soon-extinguished hopefulness, Are these travaillings of a greater birth? |
