Into different lives, or into any future;
You are not the same people who left that station
Or who will arrive at any terminus,
While the narrowing rails slide together behind you"
or as you make your way to the boarding gate through the time-zone hammered crowd in the transfer terminal....
I wonder what Thomas Stearns would have made of terminal 3 Changi Airport, and the subsequent voluntary reimprisonment in a huge aluminium tube as the planet turns beneath you whilst you doze fitfully an impossible six miles above the ground.
Same difference, I guess. We are not the same people as those who left LHR, or who will arrive at wherever we're going. However desirable the travel may seem, for whatever good reason it's undertaken, it's not an answer, or a question. We can't create the future by hurtling towards it at 600 miles per hour.
"Not fare well,
But fare forward, voyagers."
2 comments:
And from R S Thomas' 'The Bright Field'...
'Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past.'
Now you've reminded me of that quote I'll have to read some more again. Maybe even take my books with me and escape to Uwchmynydd and look across to Enlli. More travel. Yay!!
Excellent linkage there Blodawel, I shall follow that up in due course. I find more and more in 4 4tets these days. And sounds like a great place to read and think.
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