There was an explosion on 23rd Street between 6th and 8th Avenues on Saturday night that injured 29 people. Another bomb was found later in the evening in a garbage pail nearby, and this morning, more bombs were found out in Elizabeth, New Jersey.
Mayor DiBlasio has been on the radio announcing that New York will see its greatest level of police presence ever. Partly because of the bombs, partly because once again the UN is in town, including President Obama.
Meanwhile, in my quiet Upper East Side neighborhood, things seem calm. I live a block from the private all-girls' school my daughters went to, and a block and a half from another private all-girls' school. Down the street is an elite PS, and just a bit further down, is the Lycee Francaise and still another private elementary school.
Needless to say, the neighborhood is teeming on this raining morning with book-bagged kids making their way to various classrooms. The Brearley girls wear short 1960s-style navy blue minis--trying their best to do everything they can to subvert the school's very austere dress-code.
Men and women holding umbrellas in various states of disrepair are rushing toward buses, subways or car services.
There are no signs, up here, four miles from the bomb blast and a dozen or so from Elizabeth, that the world is coming apart at the seams.
I've read my share of Dystopia and it's usually pretty, er, dystopian. But if we are entering--in the case of Donald Trump, galloping into, a new Dystopia, I happen to believe it won't look trememdously different from a normal day.
Young kids will still splash through puddles. Somehow we will still be rushing to work on a Monday morning. Somehow we will go on.
Faulkner said we will prevail.
Frost, prefered fire to ice.
But I think Eliot had it best:
The
Hollow Men
Mistah Kurtz-he deadA penny for the Old Guy
I
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us-if at all-not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
II
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.
Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer-
Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom
III
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.
Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.
IV
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.
V
Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
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