Fortress of souls

People have often been compared to fortresses. Or buildings. Or contests. Or whatever. "sometimes people build walls just to see who will tear them down"

A winters day
In a deep and dark December;
I am alone,
Gazing from my window to the streets below
On a freshly fallen silent shroud of snow.
I am a rock,I am an island.
Ive built walls,
A fortress deep and mighty,
That none may penetrate.
I have no need of friendship;
friendship causes pain.
Its laughter and its loving I disdain.
I am a rock,
I am an island.
Don't talk of love,
But Ive heard the words before;
Its sleeping in my memory.
I wont disturb the slumber of feelings that have died.
If I never loved I never would have cried.
I am a rock,
I am an island.
I have my books
And my poetry to protect me;
I am shielded in my armor,
Hiding in my room, safe within my womb.
I touch no one and no one touches me.
I am a rock,
I am an island.
And a rock feels no pain;
And an island never cries.

Simon and Garfunkel ladies and gents. If you haven't heard it, you should hear it sometime soon.

We read "The Minister's Black Veil" by Nathaniel Hawthorne. It's about how people hide secrets from other people, I guess. It's interesting to see that people who search for something often only find how much they really don't know. Rhetoric is generally used when someone is not expecting a response. Are journals rhetoric? To people write to no one? Or themselves? or to people they don't even know. What person writes down the secretest things in their soul? How do they do it? Is it stored up, forever afterwards because they guard it jealously? Do they easily proclaim to the world what is written down, only because it is written down?

So much of the world today is difficult to discern. What is and what is not? How can truth be seen with limited eyes? The lights flash across the screen and black dots appear arranging themselves into shapes. How can this smear of black show what one person, one being, with a heart of emotion or steel, is feeling? Trained by society and tradition to accept limits on what we can know and find, is it such a wonder that true love is regarded as a myth? That burning hate is disregarded as a mere grudge? Who can say where the road goes?

The gears whir and the keys click, and one person speaks out silently for no one else to hear. For how can one hear what isn't said? How can something which you cannot see through be clear?

One must always write to an intended audience, if they are to be effective and proficient. This, and other processes have been inculcated. Do processes by necessity force out new processes with as little meaning and function as the first? What does it matter if you use your 5 dollar bills before your ones, and always calculate your change days in advance. The tiles on the floor are purely aesthetic, and yet they determine the paths that are walked.

Are needs graven into us by a hand unseen and never felt? How do we see ourselves? Is the only mirror we have our mind? Or is the mind a broken reflecting pool, spilling out its contests to splash on other broken vessels? Do our minds then change each other? As one leaks into the next, do we change beyond the possibility of our own recognition?

It is almost sure that we change. One is never the same, for even the march of time will dictate that you never reach the same moment twice, and you therefore are unique. Just like everyone else. If everyone, then, is unique, how can we be outstanding? By banding together? Is the formula for individuality the loss of self?

Time is possibly relative. What reference then, can that be, if it is always moving? Can you tell me what time it is NOW? Of course not, because now has already become then, making itself not now. Continuously. Now is not now all the time. And it contradicts itself thusly.

And now I am tired. The time has come. For me to sleep. All of this has little meaning, and yet it must, because I am a living person. What, then, happens now next?