Sunday, July 10, 2011

Bathroom Monologue: A Maze Inescapable


Want to listen? Click the triangle on the left, or click this text.

This is a castle others call The World. There is one window inside every wall, but there is a wall outside every window. Look through and you look upon the next wall. Climb through, look through that next window, and you will see another wall.

Spend days upon weeks upon months climbing through them, scaling down them, traversing across a thousand mossy courtyards. You will only look out upon yet another wall. Scale the battlements to see another, higher one. Be vigilant enough to scale the tallest tower imaginable, and you will see over many, but they will topple into the horizon.

There is no way out, only an infinite way in. All this stone, all this architecture, to protect something. What? No one can say, because how does one traverse to the center of a thing that is only wall after window after wall? Perhaps you're headed towards the treasure while you think you're on your way out. Or perhaps, after twenty years of squeezing through narrow windowsills, you'll circle the globe and find the first wall you ever passed. Will you recognize it if you do? Perhaps the castle defends itself, not by force of arms, but by becoming a maze inescapable.

4 comments:

  1. Very clever piece, John. I'm glad you didn't post this on a monday, though, or my head would have exploded. :)

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  2. Makes me think of how nothing worth doing is ever easy, the obstacles we face with every tidbit of perceived progress, the fact that we'll all be human beings no matter how "far" we travel, physically or spiritually. I particularly like the last question re returning to a previously passed wall, twenty years later . . . it speaks to me of what we might call progress, its nature. Very thought provoking.

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  3. Most excellent metaphor!

    There is one way out, of course, but nobody who gets out lives. :-P

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