I think its safe to write again. No one is listening.
You have to be silent for a while to make everyone forget that you're there. And then, when the coast is clear and everyone has gone about their business again, then you can get out your new eyes and look around.
I can look around again. Nobody cares.
So I'll post what I want to post.
Last night I was in a classroom, sitting on a bare plastic chair, and listening to an old man I know speak to an audience of no more then six.
He is a great purveyor of worldly knowledge, able to tame the ebb and flow of current events into a coherent trajectory. I think its fair to call him a prophet for our modern times.
I would be excited to have sat before him, and listened to him speak. But he wasn't as I expected him, he was old and frail and in a wheelchair. His hair was much whiter then in any picture I had seen, and his skin was much more wrinkled. He was wheeled up to the podium, where he spoke in a barely audible voice.
It occured to me that he looked a little bit like myself.
But he did not speak as I expected, he launched into a rageful tirade, condemning the poor for their stupidity and sloth, proclaiming that we have always dominated, and will always be the masters of men. He spoke incoherently, his ideas confused and without structure. 'Who is this man?' I thought, and when I looked in his eyes I saw nothing but vacancy and I thought this is not the same man.
So it was far from the well reasoned ideas that I had been expecting. And I thought to myself, how sad, and who is really to say what a man's views really are, for they are only words that are said in that very moment, and past that they are really nothing at all but memories.
And still, even on hearing this ranting fool, his poorly crafted barbs exposed in their shocking nakedness, it still seemed hollow that there were only six others sitting to take it in.
When his time was up, he was dragged off the podium by his moderator, who attempted to hush him as he refused to stop his speech. 'The time is up,' she pleaded quietly, but he wanted none of it, and seemed oblivious to the reality that no one was really listening.
Finally he was taken from the podium, and quieted down to a degree. Questions were taken, to which the moderator answered herself.
'Is the time not really up?' I thought. I felt suddenly overwhelmed by impatience. I looked over at this bumbling old man, the shell of who I thought I knew, he was still muttering and cursing under his breath, and I realised how brief the flame of that sort of knowledge is, it is good only for the moment of which it is current, and after the moment is done you have to prove yourself again, or accept your banishment to the asylum of history.
- posted by Sigurd12/21/2006 08:23:00 PM