THE THOMAS EDISON PAPERS

295. THE THOMAS EDISON PAPERS:

[A. Varied Shades of Brown and Red] -
I will do nothing more ever again except read I shall remain silent in solace and without discourse for the current of all other mankind does not mix well with me and I am within the spot of deepest memory or deepest other some realm of reality which speaks softly only to an inner voice and place so again I shall do nothing ever anymore but remain silent and read and listen perhaps to strands of music celestial things Brahms-like in delicate sweetness for I shall swarm and swim and swagger away from and past from everything which may touch me as I want it not I must create my own system or be enslaved by another man's you can have anything you want if you just ask for it in an unselfish tone of voice or you can ask for nothing and get nothing in return ? is that right ? as I think about it I don't know if it's worth let alone right and don't care in this darkness either : things which I am thinking about the old fuel shed on the side property in Plainfield which shed has now been torn down for quite some time and only a grassy field remains but while it was there it was quite an interesting if very small building sort of a glorified shed with a very heavy looking roof and a glass one serving window approximating perhaps a fuel-buyer’s place of purchase as they drove up each fuel truck well perhaps and I am thinking of you out late again without any I don't know cares in the world may it never come crashing down on your head in that fashion but remember all that you create comes back to haunt you so I will never move again for I am seeking to attain the perfection of solitude no movement no mention no desires no wants no recompense I am thinking of the old gasoline station in Ithaca which I used to walk past high atop the college hill and read the gauges as it was always seemingly closed or never very busy and the old pumps looked very worse for wear and were almost as broken down as a gas pump can be especially in 1971 before anybody thought of it as anything more than a mere convenience certainly not a global player and certainly not something which would take a bite out of one's wallet but all that's moved along and the world still functions even as we never thought it would back in those early 70's years when gasoline like this suddenly went to 59 and then 69 and egad one dollar per gallon before anybody could stop it !'how we gonna' pay for that, Charley?’ was like on everybody's lips even the little girls who were soon to be bigger girls and then women and who by now have been broadcast with seed for sure and have probably propagated their 3 or 4 kids each and know the ways of all the world singing and shopping and driving with that two-buck thirty gas to every little store and office with kids without kids with men without men on their third or fourth husband in many cases neck deep in penis and pain all in the same measure well anyway what did we create and who cared then or now but we all moved on and even that fire station which I am remembering in Elmira Heights which housed two red fire trucks back when they were most often always red and small not like today's massive behemoths in bright yellows and horrid colors and huge and loud and big all for the same reason but differently done - like oh so many other things - like even the girls I just spoke about have had their sexual moments in the same manner but different probably out of boredom or maybe even the profit motive it opens up vast possibilities into nearly every opening and orifice in the sweet human body and allows deposit of fluids and semens onto and into most everything but then again isn't it that we men have the hose truck and the hook and extension ladder and all that masculine fantasy stuff about putting out fires with huge jets and streams and squirts of water or liquid it's all balderdash quadrupled with love and intentions and that's what makes the world go round if it does only and anyway that's what I was thinking about like the snows of Kilimanjaro but this was the snows of Ithaca there for a moment and I remember the new building there atop the University hill the Agronomy building maybe I can't remember although I know where it was and can exactly place it in the geography of my mind it was made to rust and was constructed in sort of an unfinished steel iron metal that weathered and went in a few years from a gray silver to varied shades of brown and red into almost a rust I wonder what the advancing mathematics of the rust deterioration is and what therefore the expected lifespan of that building was considered and designed to be as it eventually rusts away to a non-load-bearing situation where it will be deemed unsafe and collapse onto and into itself who will be there then and how did they get that idea and design past the censors I wonder don't I you bet when that happens I might as well be in Rio for all it matters to me that's what's called relativity in action as it depends only little on my distance from it right now and will probably only affect the forty-five students and professors within it at any one time and they will then have absolutely no inkling of the genesis of the building and all they are experiencing because relative to their point of view they know nothing of it and I am thinking of people I once knew there and the girl who swam topless in the rock pools of Ithaca's high waterfalls and the students who jumped from the chasms and bridges to solve the problems the solutions of which they could not solve by any other means so actually such an action is merely a wrong answer on a college quiz nothing more and I often wondered should I have jumped with them or now but I let it pass I am too happy deeming myself happy as I read and continue so to read another bout of Tristram Shandy for instance and May Sarton's Journal of a Solitude - the use of that article 'a' always throws me - not a particular solitude but rather 'a' solitude or I guess 'a' particular solitude too much to bear and as I read I am alone and my feet are straight down as I sit or perhaps I am reclined to read and the eyes are working hard and the markings move along the page and no one shares or partakes my being alone which is the okay factor with me at that point or I am thinking of Kenilworth in New Jersey with a small but steady strip of odd one-after-the-other buildings on a wide car-prone thoroughfare making up their business district but without any coziness somehow cold and barren and of course seemingly Italian too and I recall so many other things that I decide I cannot go on because memories are the burdens and the baggage of this life yet where do they go do we take them with us if so what and where to are we therefore never alone if their are dual and multi-faceted experiences going on within us at all times perhaps even after death as we relive or try to make right what was not so before and we look back on things with a new-found eternalized wisdom with which we try to right everything maybe that's the key to theology and the summa theologica - remember that - which we all keep missing but by whatever factors we consider eternity this is factor we miss - the importance of all things - the importance of all things - the importance of all things.