Prison

This is one of those times when I can’t get away from the feeling that the earth is a prison, a place of torment. Even in my own nice American town the widespread anxiety, fear, sickness, pain and discomfort cry out for notice. One can’t avoid the sadness of loss. One can't avoid seeing the hospitals and animal shelters and funeral homes, the cemeteries, the blind and the hobbling people, the dead animals on the roads, the shoppers on electric carts breathing with tubes up their noses, the horribly twisted man on the oversized tricycle with his pitiful hoard of aluminum cans.

Because you are reading this on a computer you probably exist on one of the relatively few comfortable spots among the many more uncomfortable spots on the planet, but you are nevertheless aware of the hunger and deprivation, misery and torture and oppression which, though they may have become numb clichés to us, nevertheless dominate the lives of millions at this very moment.

Worse, nobody knows why this has happened or what is really going on. As if we’d been dragged out of our sleep in the middle of the night and dumped into a prison camp on unknown charges, we wonder why. What have we done to deserve this? What’s going to happen next? Is there any life beyond this prison? Who’s behind it all? Is there even anybody in charge?

We humans on Earth speculate and speculate and speculate about our state and fate, and we know no more now than the philosophers of ancient Greece and those before them who speculated about the same things. Well, we do seem to know more about the nature of matter and the Sun and Moon and stars, but that’s about it. Essentially, we know nothing. We go about in a daze, hoping we will wake up someday.

Now I hear someone who, advocating a more cheerful attitude, is pointing to the pretty flowers and the birth of babies -- but Devil’s Island had beautiful views, and a baby’s first day on Earth is its first day on death row. I don't like to sound negative, but I am beginning to experience the psychological advantages of facing the facts.

William Butler Yeats described himself as a soul attached to a dying animal. As I get older my body reminds me more and more of that even though I am thankfully in much better shape than many people my age. At least I and Yeats developed a sense of soul, of “a real me”. You may put it down to wishful thinking, but I am glad that I see myself in the almost humorous position of sailing a small boat while bits and pieces break off and fall into the water. . . rather than seeing myself as the boat.


An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress. . .

Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium”