LETTERS 

The writer, on entering the city again, said to himself, "it's a strange thing that to reclaim happiness so much has to be lost and forgotten until it is a passion to forget and then a vengeance to forget and all the energy used up subverts the happiness that's been gained." The city, of late, had become a compressed, provincial vacuum where vanity and stupidity rose to the top. There were the instructions for the silent things that came from the root and history of what had been imposed by the geography and spirit of the place. The people? The writer saw their disquietude, depressions, ennui; here and there were pockets of joy. Simple and worthwhile joy!

But most were vain, foolish, empty and stuffed with a kind of metallic straw. They appeared, at times, as gluttonous peasants who had turned in their plow for a car and would run a man over if he suggested they were peasants. All kinds of talk with no proof of what they talk. The writer felt sinful in some of the thoughts he had about those who dwelled with him in the city. He called himself a Jeffersonian democrat and left it at that. He wanted the city dismantled and the parts left for the mechanical birds who were breeding in iron nests above the clanging avenues. The best thing the city person did was follow; he had a great talent for following. If they didn't follow they would go into a stupor, see devils, and eventually leap from the bridge or get busy with innocuous pursuits.

Too much cleverness and over-weaning intelligence slipped to any fake magneto placed in front of them. They had been robbed of some sacred moment and sucked away into the disembodied vacuum where rationalizations were assumed to be real. A great price was extracted on behalf of experience.

David Eide
November 22, 1999
Back to Jobs page
Back to Letters
Back to Laughing Sun
Back to Oasis