LETTERS: LIFE FORCE AFFECTS ARDENT LEADERS MORE

To the editor:

With the admission of indescretions by incoming House Speaker Bob Livingston comes perhaps a reminder. That life force that drives us all drives more ardently great and ardent leaders.

Those of us who have oggled Clinton's excesses from a position of religious sanctity might take heed also. The great progenitor of Jesus, namely King David, seems to have begun his public career dallying with Bathsheba and for a cover-up to have murdered her husband. Yet at length God accepted his atonement. And, so it seems, did his people. At the time of David's impending death, folk wisdom decreed that the medicine of inspiration in the form of willing maidens be brought to his bedchamber as a stimulant to his flagging health. When the great leader "gat no heat," he gave up the ghost, and the people were reconciled to their loss. To paraphrase Nietzsche (not this writer's favorite philosopher) regarding the power of the fierce spirit within us-:Those who perpetually stand back from life and who hide from its more primitive inspirations seize not upon life itself, but upon its cast-off garments.

A. NASLUND

Cape Girardeau