Growl of 400 Horses

May 6, 2017 Jerry King Comments 0 Comment

I walked across the parking lot at 7AM, a sunlit morning in May. A silver corvette was parked in the center of two parking spaces. As I walked by a young female approached the passengers side of the vehicle with coffee for two. A young male waited in the drivers side, his baseball cap reversed. The cap, worn with bill reversed is a sign of youth and virility, the male prepared and willing –for war. She took the passenger seat in the Vette. Approaching the door of Starbucks, behind me I heard the growl of the corvette, catlike, with two young adults, moving toward route 83.

That guy could have been me, some 30 years ago. That is, if I had been able to afford a corvette.

I offer for meditation and nourishment, these lines excerpted from T. S. Eliot’s poem Gerontion. The title means “little old man” in Greek.

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now

History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors

And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,

Guides us by vanities. Think now

She gives when our attention is distracted

And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions

That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late

What’s not believed in, or is still believed,

In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon

Into weak hands, what’s thought can be dispensed with

Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think

Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices

Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues

Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.

A professor that I greatly respected once commented to me that he did not think it possible for an educated person to be truly happy. With the addition of years I know now what he meant. Education entails awareness of the human story and of self awareness. Happiness, a childlike abandon to momentary joy is difficult. One knows too much. The Armenian genocide, the Vietnam War, and to cite a recent case in point, the dropping of the blockbuster MOAB bomb in Afghanistan. History is vanity piled upon vanity. A vanity exacerbates rather than satisfies the craving.