When I consider the children of the middle class as representatives of phenomena to my subject sense I can hardly see them at all, they fade into the shrubbery, of which a superabundance is @3sui generis@1 their world. I am likely to be overwhelmed, or distracted, leaning my mind on some green bosom. But then they are things-in-themselves, these children, and their glee is a thing-in-itself, their exuberance as they terrorize one another, wiping themselves out in a continuum of destruction, themselves as surrogates of parents. But the parents remain representations, never things-in-themselves, but only shadow-figures taking out the garbage; and thus the Will of Schopenhauer's essay leaps out at me in children-in-themselves, starker than stones or stars, so that I cower; for the future is theirs, day by day they remove it from the plastic wrap of non-being, and leave it on the death-strewn lawns. Yes, if will is all we know of ourselves as things, and thence of all things, how can I not infer a radical divergence of degree between everything else and children? The spirea dies, the little nebulae of viburnum wink out in willing whatness, but the children's shrieks of bliss and triumph are merciless, raging from another world, another time, so that all understanding is blocked and thrust back as mere knowledge, odious data, nauseating demonstrations, these relentless present children of the middle class. Used with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368-0271, www.cc.press.org | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...THE CAMBODIAN BOX by KAREN SWENSON SONG, FR. ERNEST MALTRAVERS by EDWARD GEORGE EARLE LYTTON BULWER-LYTTON THE SHOOTING OF DAN MCGREW by ROBERT WILLIAM SERVICE IN MEMORIAM A.H.H.: 11 by ALFRED TENNYSON LILIES: 27. THE WAVE-TOSSED VESSEL by GEORGE BARLOW (1847-1913) |