I and this mystery here we stand

The curtain is falling on Berlin, and I feel like I am riding a tiny, broken tricycle down a steep, muddy gorge. It's starting to rain, and the slope is getting slicker. The ride is getting more dangerous, but also more fun. I may fall down and I will certainly get wet. But you can always do the laundry and start over again. All else failing, left, right; left, right.

Although I am always a willing ear if someone is willing to read out loud, I fell out of love with reading at some point after childhood WITH, however, the flagrant exception of the last three months, during which time I've managed to read 5 marvelous novels due to their titles having been implanted in my brain by more seasoned, less seasonal readers than me.*

I did however for some reason read Walt Whitman as a child, and it still seems to be the answer to my mood. Can you believe this stuff?

...

Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much? have you reckon'd the earth much?
Have you practis'd so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

...

I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.


*A Prayer for Owen Meaney (John Irving), This Boy's Life (Tobias Wolff), The Magic Mountain (Thomas Mann), Herzog (Saul Bellow), and The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov)