I disappear into the cavern of my world. Shutting the door behind me; turning the lock on my fears and prejudices and pent up frustrations. They beat upon the door. I hear their ungracious muffled yells: "You can't stay in the there forever!" I ignore them. I breathe freely and take in the quiet. All is silence in here. A drop falls from a stalactite and drowns, noiselessly in a pool. Ripples. All is cool. And calm. It's just me in here. Just me. Alone and unafraid. Alone? You're not alone. I tense at the sound of the haunting voice. Prickles rush down my spine. The voice is familiar. Very familiar. In desperation and horror I start to run- trying to lose the voice in the maze of my world. But, somehow I cannot out run it. It berates me. It startles me around every turn; it echoes through the cavernous halls. Wasn't I the only one here? Hadn't I bolted the door?

But... who can escape one's thoughts?

"[The poet] Keats, I think, sensed man's need for the timeless. His Grecian urn is a 'foster-child of Silence and slow Time,' and it 'tease[s] us out of thought/As doth eternity.' It is surely the eternal that Keats aches for.

If, indeed, we all have a kind of appetite for eternity, we have allowed ourselves to be caught up in a society that frustrates our longing at every turn. Half our inventions are advertised to save time-- the washing machine, the fast car, the jet flight-- but for what? Never were people more harried by time: by watches, by time clocks, by precise schedules... There is, in fact, some truth in 'the good old days': no other civilization of the past was ever so harried by time.

And yet, why not? Time is our natural environment. We live in time as we live in the air we breathe. And we love the air-- who has not taken deep breathes of pure, fresh country air, just for the pleasure of it? How strange that we cannot love time. It spoils our loveliest moments. Nothing quite comes up to expectations because of it. We alone: animals, so far as we can see, are unaware of time, untroubled. Time is their natural environment. Why do we sense that it is not ours?

...It suggests that we were created for eternity. Not only are we harried by time, we seem unable, despite a thousand generations, even to get used to it. We are always amazed at it-- how fast it goes, how slowly it goes, how much of it is gone. Where, we cry has time gone? We aren't adapted to it, not at home in it. If that is so, it may appear as a proof, or at least a powerful suggestion, that eternity exists and is our home."

[Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy]

My ubiquitous circuit
among the ruins of time
cannot escape them:
roman symbols
towering like giants
six and seven, ten
and twelve.
Glass could live
eternally,
if not shattered.
But, I am a shroud
of sand's seashells.
I will not last long.
And one day,
like a castle of sand
away I will be washed,
into the spectral sea.

Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity... it is exactly this balance of apparent contradictions that has been the whole buoyancy of the healthy man. The secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid... The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything. Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility.

-Chesterton, Orthodoxy

The Castle-Builder

A gentle boy, with soft and silken locks,
A dreamy boy, with brown and tender eyes,
A castle-builder, with his wooden blocks,
And towers that touch imaginary skies.

A fearless rider on his father's knee,
An eager listener unto stories told
At the Round Table of the nursery,
Of heroes and adventures manifold.

There will be other towers for thee to build;
There will be other steeds for thee to ride;
There will be other legends, and all filled
With greater marvels and more glorified.

Build on, and make thy castles high and fair,
Rising and reaching upward to the skies;
Listening to voices in the upper air,
Nor lose thy simple faith in mysteries.

Longfellow

a schizophrenic e minor
hits his heads
against the wall
his sister chords spiral
from the strings
in echoes and chants

they fly
reciting rhythms
to the windows
they fly
then shatter
and burn

last i saw the
e minor die

his mouths were
reciting rhythms to
the windows

I find that in the summer's end, while many things change,

many things stay. I take the taxi to the hill. I scatter dust
as I run down the sloping grass, wondering why --
why the days blink so fast? The season is changing and so is my
mood. My thoughts are flying a million directions; and to my
indignation, some are wanting to lie dormant, wrapped cozily
in a tartan plaid! My summer impulsive wildness is getting sleepy
and swirling smoke and fires and flickering shadows on the
walls sound nice. The warm breeze reminds me of coldness and
scarves. My ideas are starting to turn... turn colors like the
leaves soon will. And my thoughts... oh my thoughts... some are
flying south, but some... some are dreaming of cinnamon and
wool, hungrily dreaming of past summer days as if they were a
custard of pleasant fairy tales. Oh. And taxi! Could you please
stop at the next coffee shop?

I need some warmth from this sudden chilliness.