How does one characterize a life, find balance between receiving
and giving? I, like others, have been on that tightrope,
vertiginous, swinging like a monkey, unaware
of the yawning abyss down below. Culture provides!
That is the moral. The concept of surfeit. Fridays
we go to the movies. Sunday matinees
are for Broadway. The plays take us; and we are absorbed
by them entirely. The conflicts, the antinomious concerns,
are sent, like discarded, broken bric-a-brac,
down the chute and into the never-never land of a musty basement.
What do you imagine?
We play the keys of our computer
like a player piano, conjuring, albeit, on occasion, brilliantly,
some pre-packaged magic. These are our productions:
prepared and fully cooked: food from the corner deli.
It is just too easy, too easy. Given the choice
do we play a game (of Bridge, for example) with the god inside this machine,
or do we turn on Microsoft Word? (An Alternative Session)?
The flesh is sad.
That was really the end of a century, the beginning of another.
Our apprenticeship also ends, but with a fatal crash.
So much for the program.