Waiting for the Rain [antikvár]

One Things are happening here and there and whether you can see them or not you can't certainly say the Old Man doesn't see them. The air trembles with roaring thunder and the earth grumbles with earthquakes and shrieking lightning splits the darkness into quivering shreds of light and he is a lonely whirling little dot who has to hold his own to stay alive. Way, way ahead of him is a pinpoint flash which keeps on going farther and farther, but it's all right - the distance is always the same despite sensations of now being very far away and cold and lonely. And there is this nameless thing, a feeling, akin to hunger, but again you know that this passes too, just as so many things have passed without you doing anything about them. Or - does it pass? He is not sure. Sometimes he is certain that it doesn't pass. He wants it so much to pass that he thinks it's gone when it really is still there. Still there, under everything else - so many things happening at the same time - enough to make one's head snap and spin. It is under there, together with the feeling of being very near to, and involved in, the pulsing and flashing brilliant centre. This is the Old Man's drum. But you don't hear it because you are making so much nőise with your cracked little tin toys. If you could only stop and listen, you would hear it. It starts from a nameless, placeless place somewhere in this darkness, and, as you listen, you think it's only a small sound, but - listen carefully: it has the very rhythm of something disturbing the deep bowels of the earth. You don't hear it? It is there! Always has been there! Once you hear it, it fills you up, it shakes you down to the roots, then you realize in a flash that it's not itself that has been absent but you: it is it that hears you and answers. But you keep on making a racket, you keep on making a din and so when it comes to you, you don't hear it. But it will come to you - you wait and see. And when it finally comes to you, you will be lost. Meanwhile you can laugh and play and pretend and ignore it, but you will not ignore it for long. No, you won't! Meanwhile it's the Old Man's drum. 'Let me play my own drum,' he would say to you, if his words were your words. Each to his own drum. But then your words are