First time I came upon a snake in the wild, I thought it was dead; I wasn't afraid. It wasn't dead.
Second time I saw a snake in the wild I was indeed afraid. Enraptured, but frightened stiff. It slowly coiled out of sight, leaving me, and I was frightened and powerless to stop it.
Oh let the man be alone. Let him—if nothing else—possess himself in silence. For in the cogged and running vessels of the city, there is only noise, only the lifeless static, ever-going hupala of white mentality: meaningless, once a man dies. Meaningless because it has sold out his life while he lived. And when he is dead, when silence itself has been silenced, there is nothing not even a blackness, not even oblivion. It is only the quite final, the quite-the-end.
For life is dying, dying on us, going out. Life, that is only for a time, before the spark is extinguished, hailstorms of death knock it out. No God, no Buddah, can ever put back life, once it has been forced out. Death is the undone; it cannot itself be un-undone.
So our cities, which are not life, which are the un-life, they drain us out, they kill us, and never will they give us a gulp of our own life-throb, nothing more than a parched skeleton-sip.
So let, I say, let the man be alone—at least awhile. Let him be wordless, if only awhile. Soon he will die and will have lost his chance.
And the only one a man gets.
