LETTERS 

The writer was surrounded by what he had heard a commentator call, 'the pursuit of wealth.' An excellent American sport without question. The facts of money and commodity was a difficult question for the writer. All the pursuit, accumulation, desire enlarged into a myth and it played itself out in every crevice the writer peeked into. 'Ah,' the writer told himself, 'money is the Olympus of the modern age. Nothing is free from this myth. Nothing, that is, that lives on the surface of the roads.'

Sometimes the writer felt the pressure of this pursuit to such an extent that he would move to a park with a grand oak tree and sit quietly waiting for the pressure to relent. 'Hmm,' he thought, 'no doubt the world is on a path. Everything has been reduced in its way. Any obstacle to economic growth is swept away without a blink of an eye. Some of these obstacles include old superstitions, old wisdom's, old patterns and they are systematically purged by the greed of men. Doesn't the modern person, then, become a machine or, at least, the parody of a machine? The old foibles, weaknesses, and sins are beating at the center of his heart and when they sing out have a metallic clang to them.'

If he had more time he would have searched for the corruption that preceded human life. Nothing that had power could come through with the promise of eternal life.

He watched the cars pass on all fours sides of the park. No face was familiar to him. There was an intention in those expressions, he mused. Ah well, the world is an inherited bag of gas and they use it at their pleasure. Although pleasure, now, is an imperative, something that must be pursued. It produced a seething people with secret dreams pissed away daily by the motion demanded from them. They either consume or die pitifully. It was a world easy to become unheard from, unknown, and unpitied.

David Eide
November 11, 1999
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