My failure to evolve has been causing me a lot of grief lately.I can't walk on my knuckles through the acres of shattered glass in the streets.I get lost in the arcades. My feet stink at the soirees.The hills have been bulldozed from whence cameth my help.The halfway houses where I met my kind dreaming of flickering lights in the woods are shuttered I don't know why. "Try," say the good people who bring me my food,"to make your secret anguish your secret weapon. Otherwise, your immortality will bean exhibit in a vitrine at the local museum, a picture in a book."But I can't get the hang of it. The heavy instructions fall from my hands.It takes so long for the human to become a human!He affrights civilizations with his cry. At his approach,the mountains retreat. A great wind crashes the garden party.Manipulate singly neither his consummation nor his despairbut the two together like curettesand peel back the pitch-black integuments to discover the penciled-in figure on the painted-over mural of time, sitting on the sketch of a boulder belowhis aching sunrise, his moody, disappointed sunset.
Vijay Seshadri, The Descent of Man
