They grow old as they wait
and the ship never passes.
— Pablo Neruda
I expected something more grandiose than this rusty little gate with a broken latch. Maybe not grandiose, given the early emphasis on humility, but anyway something more befitting the occasion, more … revelatory. But here I am in the altogether, naked as the day I was born, though quite a bit more … developed I should guess, wondering whether to wait for someone to let me in or a great voice calling from on high or maybe just the soft bleating of a lamb, or perhaps I am supposed to continue up the narrow lane to the Big House and announce myself to the man in charge, declaring that I am ready to serve my life sentence. Not life exactly, and rather more than a sentence. More like a tome, an opus magnum, something like one of those Victorian novels with their elaborate constructions of minutia and the omniscient narrator who knows everything about everybody, where a poor guy from the sticks gets a job in a factory and, in the end, just has to accept things as they are. I decide to wait, and time passes. And passes. And passes. And, eventually, passes me by. |
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