I lock my door upon myself

"I lock my door upon myself"

The title of this work has been chosen on the analogy of the famous painting of Fernand Knoppff.

Though very different in appearance , it is dealing with the very same thing : to seclude one self ( temporarely ) for the world that comes after you . Curtains cover the face of earth and reality .Only very soft light ,  diffuse and rosy , oozes in from different corners .

This generates extremely complicated light and dark constellations , it is more complex than a disestablishment of Church from State .

The crystal ball catches light and focuses this light  on some books.At the same time it casts a shadow on some other books , and absorbs the outlines of yet some other books , displaying their image upside down , deformed as if seen by the eye of a fish .

The cristall ball , symbol of wisdom which us westerners claim to have .So many pieces of the universal jigsaw we puzzled together , so many secrets we solved , so many bits of science piled up on the mountain of universal truth .We visited the moon , we defied pest and inquisition .Reformation and contrareformation ., WW I and WW II . The particle accelerator , microwave and cream without fat , yes that too .

But now there is overpopulation , mankind follows a J curve , there is a hole in the ozone layer , nuclear waist , greenhouse effect , acid deposition . Apparently , the extinction of just about anything that crawls around on the sublunary is just around the corner .

And the icing of the cake is that the free word of speech could become extinct too . No more praise of Folly , gone the dissent .

Ah , just throw away the whole caboodle . We already imagined ourselves on the top of the Olympos , but most likely it was just a molehill.

When there is snow ahead , the bones of your body can become sore , when the end of a culture approaches , likewise . And when I'm half asleep I can hear a crowd shouting that the time is ripe for a new Messiah .

Just leave those curtains closed for a while , I want to marvel  just once again all those magnificent truths that are still legitimate for the time being. Let me stay at  Tintagel Castle for a few moments more , awaiting , as unbelievable as it seems , its final destruction .

Walter Leclair