The truck driver saw my thumb and picked me up. He surprised me by turning the conversation almost immediately from his "brand new rig" to student dissent, black rage, big government, Vietnam and the thousand other ills the sixties have given birth to. He talked sanely, with no noticeable prejudices, and after he had bemoaned the fact that everything seemed to be coming apart at the seams he told me that "whoever planned this world millions of years back did a fabulous job of it, because it's all gonna fall apart at the same time and there's gonna be nothing left over--no spare parts."
The new "Newsweek" has a feature on the middle class, the silent majority that is now speaking out, demanding a hearing. That majority and its pronouncements do not make sense-- they smack of "I believe this out of a desperate need to believe something. Take this away and I drown." The article is a frightening and bewildering guide to where we are right now.
"Alice's Restaurant" is a beautiful movie. It pinpoints precisely the plight of the beautiful people--especially by the fact that it is a movie without an ending. Alice and Ray are left with an empty church, and the dream which had come true for a while is again unpeopled: the kids have moved on. There is no ending because there is no answer, just sincere questions, and no, that is not enough, but it is all there is.
The Bible and Shakespeare and Alice in Wonderland, appropriately pulled out of context and twisted, can be made to say something about almost anything. This time Alice:
". . . but answer came there none,The Walrus and the Carpenter had eaten all the oysters, but we have eaten all the answers, and now the logical conclusion of practically everything seems to be that there is a logical conclusion to absolutely nothing.
And this was scarcely odd because
They'd eaten every one."
I'd like to use this column for the rest of the year (or however long it takes) to try to evolve an answer. If I come up with anything, it will only be a new perspective, but I need that, and maybe you do, too.
I'd like to use some lines from e.e. cummings as a springboard:
"King Christ, this world is all aleak,"Who dares to call himself a man."
and life preservers there are none,
and waves which only He may walk
who dares to call Himself a man."