I close my eyes and this image floats beside me
The sweaty-toothed madman with a stare that pounds my brains
His hands reach out and choke me
And all the time he's mumbling
Truth, like a blanket that always leaves your feet cold.
You push it, stretch it, it will never be enough
Kick it beat it, it will never cover any of us.
From the moment we enter crying, to the moment we leave dying,
it will just cover your face
as you wail and cry and scream.
~ {Todd Anderson} The Dead Poets' Society
And when i see the picture of the old man
he looks to me as if he were made of stone
of a stone that is fossilised and made into a paperweight,a stone used as an everyday object but containing a remenant of a lost soul that once existed and which now ceases to be.
He looks at me with weary eyes that say nothing yet they seem to listen intently to what i had to say to him and to the world.
I told him that he scared me, that his wild white hair looked as if it were an old lion's mane, that his forehead was ugly with wrinkles and that he had ragged cuticles even though i couldnt see his hands.
This Tableaux Vivant told no story like the picture of the silly girl and the flower nest to it but it was more alive than the souls which wandered in that old dark cave behind Wellton Woods.
The picture was alive, the old man was alive, so was the God of the old dark cave behind Wellton Woods.
It was once before a mere stand of an old lamp which never worked, but now it was the God of an old dark cave in which wandered the souls of the dead poets and the soul of one who was Puck.
In the end we yawp:
"O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done"
And then.
"We took the world as given.Cigarettes
Were twenty sseveral cents a pack, and gas
As much per gallon. Sex came wrapped in rubber
And veild in supernatural scruples, - call
Them chivalry
Things grabbed us where we lived, the only life worth living was the private life, and last
Worst scandal in this characterization -
We did not know we were a generation."
~ John Updike
Class of 1954
