I Am What I Am And Cannot

A Man Who Has Once Looked With The Archaeological Eye Will Never See Quite Normally. He Will Be Wounded By What Other Men Call Trifles. It Is Possible To Refine The Sense Of Time Until An Old Shoe In The Bunch Grass Or A Pile Of Nineteenth Century Beer Bottles In An Abandoned Mining Town Tolls In One's Head Like A Hall Clock.

Since The First Human Eye Saw A Leaf In Devonian Sandstone And A Puzzled Finger Reached To Touch It, Sadness Has Lain Over The Heart Of Man. By This Tenuous Thread Of Living Protoplasm, Stretching Backward Into Time, We Are Linked Forever To Lost Beaches Whose Sands Have Long Since Hardened Into Stone. The Stars That Caught Our Blind Amphibian Stare Have Shifted Far Or Vanished In Their Courses, But Still That Naked, Glistening Thread Winds Onward. No One Knows The Secret Of Its Beginning Or Its End. Its Forms Are Phantoms. The Thread Alone Is Real; The Thread Is Life.

If You Cannot Bear The Silence And The Darkness, Do Not Go There; If You Dislike Black Night And Yawning Chasms, Never Make Them Your Profession. If You Fear The Sound Of Water Hurrying Through Crevices Toward Unknown And Mysterious Destinations, Do Not Consider It. Seek Out The Sunshine. It Is A Simple Prescription. Avoid The Darkness.

Each One Of Us Is A Statistical Impossibility Around Which Hover A Million Other Lives That Were Never Destined To Be Born.

I Love Forms Beyond My Own, And Regret The Borders Between Us