If There Is Magic On This Planet,

For The First Time In Four Billion Years A Living Creature Had Contemplated Himself And Heard With A Sudden, Unaccountable Loneliness, The Whisper Of The Wind In The Night Reeds.

Man No Longer Dreams Over A Book In Which A Soft Voice, A Constant Companion, Observes, Exhorts, Or Sighs With Him Through The Pangs Of Youth And Age. Today He Is More Likely To Sit Before A Screen And Dream The Mass Dream Which Comes From Outside.

Certainly Science Has Moved Forward. But When Science Progresses, It Often Opens Vaster Mysteries To Our Gaze. Moreover, Science Frequently Discovers That It Must Abandon Or Modify What It Once Believed. Sometimes It Ends By Accepting What It Has Previously Scorned.

Tomorrow Lurks In Us, The Latency To Be All That Was Not Achieved Before.

Every Time We Walk Along A Beach Some Ancient Urge Disturbs Us So That We Find Ourselves Shedding Shoes And Garments Or Scavenging Among Seaweed And Whitened Timbers Like The Homesick Refugees Of A Long War... Mostly The Animals Understand Their Roles, But Man, By Comparison, Seems Troubled By A Message That, It Is Often Said, He Cannot Quite Remember Or Has Gotten Wrong... Bereft Of Instinct, He Must Search Continually For Meanings... Man Was A Reader Before He Became A Writer, A Reader Of What Coleridge Once Called The Mighty Alphabet Of The Universe.