I Know

Yes, I know: posting as I do on this website is playing the lyre as Rome burns. I feel the tension of this awareness every moment of the day. It forces me to question why I bother to write, why I bother to get up in the morning, why I bother to do anything.

I have no excuse for acting as if our modern age were somehow normal, but I do have one explanation. In a few years, I'll be dead. When I was younger, I did as much as I could (within legal means) to prevent the sort of world in which we now find ourselves. I protested, I participated in committees, I mailed off books and pamphlets, I was arrested. But I'm not young any more, and nothing that I did back then has made a speck of difference.

Any hope for a different world, any hope for human survival, will have to come from young people with better ideas for protest and activism than I was able to put forward. I failed; they will have to succeed, or die. The task is theirs.

And so, if I talk about symphonies, or films, or poems, or short stories, please understand that these posts are indications of my failure. If I had better things to offer the world, I would share them.