Choices, More Choices Than We Like Afterward

We Think We Learn From Teachers, And We Sometimes Do. But The Teachers Are Not Always To Be Found In School Or In Great Laboratories. Sometimes What We Learn Depends Upon Our Own Powers Of Insight.

Primitives Of Our Own Species, Even Today Are Historically Shallow In Their Knowledge Of The Past. Only The Poet Who Writes Speaks His Message Across The Millennia To Other Hearts.

Man No Longer Dreams Over A Book In Which A Soft Voice, A Constant Companion, Observes, Exhorts, Or Sighs With Him Through The Pangs Of Youth And Age. Today He Is More Likely To Sit Before A Screen And Dream The Mass Dream Which Comes From Outside.

Nothing Grows Among Its Pinnacles; There Is No Shade Except Under Great Toadstools Of Sandstone Whose Bases Have Been Eaten To The Shape Of Wine Glasses By The Wind. Everything Is Flaking, Cracking, Disintegrating, Wearing Away In The Long, Inperceptible Weather Of Time. The Ash Of Ancient Volcanic Outbursts Still Sterilizes Its Soil, And Its Colors In That Waste Are The Colors That Flame In The Lonely Sunsets On Dead Planets.

God Knows How Many Things A Man Misses By Becoming Smug And Assuming That Matters Will Take Their Own Course.