“A rational process is a moral process. You may make an error at any step of it, with nothing to protect you but your own severity, or you may try to cheat, to fake the evidence and evade the effort of the quest — but if devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes responsibility for thinking.”
-- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (1957)
The village sleeps. They all miss it.
It’s just me, in the chill
November daybreak,
with an explosive, blazing-red Sunday morning dawn.
Why am I the only one to witness
such a spectacle?
Am I but a lucky hobo with
nothing to his name
except for the open sky
and lonely offbeat hours like this?
.
Red in the morning: surely a storm will come.
I’ll accept the weather as the
price I must pay
for this flaming horizon.
And I’ll accept myself, a
philosophic vagrant,
thinking hard over the big
picture,
and moving through the silent sleeping world
in
eccentric times and places,
lounging out on the frozen snow
throughout the meteor-torn night,
and awakening alone
in
the midst of morning’s fiery skies.
This alien way of mine might be
said, by some,
to
be a karma that I’m cursed to carry;
but its driving necessity comes instead
from being the philosopher’s
chosen means
of monitoring the pulse of all existence,
and
of holding the reins of reason firm
to guide the human ascent and quest.
.
What’s wrong with the world
that it sleeps through this once-only,
raging, radical dawn?
.
[Ross Barlow, 1986]
.
The shades of night were falling fast,
As through an Alpine village passed
A youth, who bore, 'mid snow and ice,
A banner with the strange device,
"Excelsior!"
His brow was sad; his eye beneath,
Flashed like a falchion from its sheath,
And like a silver clarion rung
The accents of that unknown tongue,
"Excelsior!"
In happy homes he saw the light
Of household fires gleam warm and bright;
Above, the spectral glaciers shone,
And from his lips escaped a groan,
"Excelsior!"
"Try not the Pass!" the old man said:
"Dark lowers the tempest overhead,
The roaring torrent is deep and wide!"
And loud that clarion voice replied,
"Excelsior!"
"Oh stay," the maiden said, "and rest
Thy weary head upon this breast!"
A tear stood in his bright blue eye,
But still he answered, with a sigh,
"Excelsior!"
"Beware the pine-tree's withered branch!
Beware the awful avalanche!"
This was the peasant's last Good-night,
A voice replied, far up the height,
"Excelsior!"
At break of day, as heavenward
The pious monks of Saint Bernard
Uttered the oft-repeated prayer,
A voice cried through the startled air,
"Excelsior!"
A traveller, by the faithful hound,
Half-buried in the snow was found,
Still grasping in his hand of ice
That banner with the strange device,
"Excelsior!"
There in the twilight cold and gray,
Lifeless, but beautiful, he lay,
And from the sky, serene and far,
A voice fell, like a falling star,
"Excelsior!"
(-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
.
“Hot summer afternoon has transformed into
Early twilight coolness and stillness. Listen …
The Hermit Thrush!”
(-Ross Barlow. From decades ago)
-Zenwind.
