The Cloud-capp'd Tow'rs

What follows is only a skeleton for my eventual composition.

The old are dull, and grey and, routine. The falsely accused inmate, Imagination, languishes in the adult mind. She was a twinkle-eyed young thing. Now she slouches, despondent, in that cold cell. On the stone walls houses with dandelions out front and flying snakes and caped magicians are overwritten in tallies. Not your standard affair these figures grow in rows of six, with a vicious line down the middle. Day by day the towers rise like a terrible pyramid. You can read them in her eyes: "To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow," they seem to say, "Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time."

It happened again, as I was laying out my ideas I got sucked into a small piece of my own metaphor, and lost the way back out. I had meant to write a short piece about the impermanence, not to mention insignificance, of what our age deems "truths of reality." I meant to draw a likeness between the illusions cloud watching children enjoy and the realities of the world. You see, the process is the same. "The way things are," in the warped perception of most people, is based on a foundation just as illusory as any cloud vision. Existence is our cloud, we make of it what we may, but it is not a monkey, a rabbit, good, or evil.

Adults are not actually weak in imagination. If anything it is too powerful in them. The manage to imagine that they understand. Very few, in our age, or any other, have been able to differentiate their own fanciful interpretations from true reality. Why? That is something for another day. The thoughts that run so clear in my head scatter when the net approaches.

My topic for tomorrow: travel in the world of ideas, a new perspective on ownership.

And for a later day: ants in the thorns.

And for a later day: language, a demon in the diagram.