So Many Roads, So Many Trains

So many roads, so many trains to ride
So many roads, so many trains to ride
I've got to find my baby, 'fore I'll be satisfied

I was standin' by my window, when I heard that whistle blow
I was standin' by my window, when I heard that whistle blow
You know I thought it was a Streamline... but it was a B & O

It was a mean ol' fireman and a cruel ol' engineer
It was a mean ol' fireman and a cruel ol' engineer
That took away my baby and left me standin' here

- Otis Rush

Into twilight.

Sixth Column

the world dissolving
at dawn
a misty silence
creeping up from
the riverbank
and rifles
being counted on
both sides

in the shadow of the vulture
gathering
for the winter
a hyena cackles
loudly at the edge
of the woods
while old guns die
silent in the moss

I am curious
but guess what?

It was all my fault

Into twilight.

Mists of solitude

Impossible, I realize, to enter another’s solitude. If it is true that we can ever come to know another human being, even to a small degree, it is only to the extent that he is willing to make himself known. A man will say: I am cold. Or else he will say nothing, and we will see him shivering. Either way, we will know that he is cold. But what of the man who says nothing and does not shiver? Where all is intractable, where all is hermetic and evasive, one can do no more than observe. But whether one can make sense of what he observes is another matter entirely.
I do not want to presume anything.
(…)
The important thing is this: I realized that even if I had done all the things I had hoped to do, his reaction would have been exactly the same. Whether I succeeded or failed did not essentially matter to him. I was not defined for him by anything that I did, but by what I was, and this meant that his perception of me would never change, that we were fixed in an unmoveable relationship, cut off from each other on opposite sides of a wall. Even more than that, I realized that none of this had anything to do with me. It had only to do with him. Like everything else in his life, he saw me only through the mists of his solitude, as if at several removes from himself. The world was a distant place for him, I think, a place he was never truly able to enter, and out there in the distance, among all the shadows that flitted past him, I was born, became his son, and grew up, as if I were just one more shadow, appearing and disappearing in a half-lit realm of his consciousness.

- Paul Auster

Into starlight.