When I was a boy, the castles of education soared impossibly large: Brick-laid with Blake, mortared with Marx, wound round-about with subsidized ivy, rooted in the 17th century.
And me, just me, on two legs, from 1981.
The flickering incandescence of rebellion started in these fortressed halls; ideas more snapped than volleyed, until at the end of our emotional tether, we society on our pale legs, we sure did fall to a gust of reason.
Emotion pounded at the walls in every century; and minds, fortified with logic and stoney fact, beat back, beat down, beat away the Crying, yelling minds. For tears do not make progress.
I was tender, careful, deferential in my youthβan idealist without ideas; merely the powder keg of emotion lurking somewhere beneath my epithelial smarts. Ready and willing to rain against the parapets of education with unsightly feeling.
And I stood, in my academic frock, at the feet of the great hall of learning. And I wondered if my legs could stand it.
Is it any wonder I was raised to be an intellectual?