Your host: clean cut, well dressed & ready…
Friday, October 20th, 2006C’est moi…
In 1939, on the eve of war, the Englishman W.H. Auden wrote these lines:
“I sit in one of the dives
On fifty second street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire . . .”
I am a passionate, only slightly clever man. My belief in some positive striving for our species is matched with an incredulity at our stupidity, a rage at our carelessness. I believe that though i have not offered much personally, i have not taken much either. Indeed, considering the consumptive nature of my upbringing, the trend in my life has been smaller, light, simpler. However, there are the friends who inspired the adventure ahead have also inspired & humbled me with the beautiful simplicity of their own lives.
Of course i still like chicken.*
In a few days i will fly across the Pacific to a HUGE glittering city of many many millions, the economic & pollutive output of which will some day be judged along with the rest of the past decades & the century ahead. We live not in a new time of lies & self deception (for that is a trait our species has & will carry for sometime), but it is a time of tools & methods vastly powerful & quick.
i will be a stranger, their lives not for me to judge.
For, on this trip, it is the walk that matters, not where we are going.
*Yes, it is me writing. Getting a bit serious there, wasn’t it?
mountainattitude