Prophet Song

by Paul Lynch

tradition is nothing more than what everyone can agree on – the scientists, the teachers, the institutions, if you change ownership of the institutions then you can change ownership of the facts, you can alter the structure of belief, what is agreed upon, that is what they are doing,

trying to change what you and I call reality, they want to muddy it like water, if you say one thing is another thing and you say it enough times, then it must be so, and if you keep saying it over and over people accept it as true – this is an old idea, of course, it really is nothing new, but you’re watching it happen in your own time and not in a book.

Sooner or later, of course, reality reveals itself, he says, you can borrow for a time against reality but reality is always waiting, patiently, silently, to exact a price and level the scales——

Thinking how of late he wants to be alone, in the end, all men seek the same isolation, she saw this once graffitied on a wall.

When Ben wakes in her lap she looks into his face trying to see the man he will become, both Mark and Bailey have proven this kind of thinking wrong, an orange can fall from an apple tree and Ben will become his own man for sure. And yet she seeks within the child for some semblance of Larry, hoping he will measure up to his father, knowing how it is so that all boys grow up and pull away from home to unmake the world in the guise of making it, nature decrees it is so.

history is a silent record of people who did not know when to leave.

History is a silent record of people who could not leave, it is a record of those who did not have a choice, you cannot leave when you have nowhere to go and have not the means to go there,

you cannot leave when your children cannot get a passport, cannot go when your feet are rooted in the earth and to leave means tearing off your feet.