Category: Poetry (Page 1 of 3)

By James Gonda.

If you are a philosopher you can do this:

Go to the top of a high building

Look down upon your fellow men

300 feet below and despise them as insects.

Like water bugs on summer ponds

They crawl and circle and hustle about idiotically

Without aim or purpose.

They do not even move with the intelligence of ants,

For ants always know when they are going home

And will reach home and get his slippers on

While you are left at your elevated station.

Man, then, to the house-topped philosopher

Is a creeping, contemptible beetle.

Brokers, poets, millionaires, bootblacks, beauties,

Hod-carriers, and politicians become little black specks

Dodging bigger black specks in streets

No wider than your thumb.

From this high view the city itself

Becomes degraded to an unintelligible mass

Of distorted buildings and impossible perspectives.

The ocean is a duck pond; the earth a lost golf ball.

All the minutiae of life are gone.

The philosopher gazes into the infinite heavens

And allows his soul to expand to the influence

Of his new view.

He feels that he is the heir to Eternity

and the child of Time.

What are the ambitions, the achievements,

The paltry conquests and loves of those restless insects below

Compared with the serene and awful immensity

Of the universe above?

It is guaranteed that the philosopher will have these thoughts

And when he takes the elevator down

His mind is broader, his heart is at peace,

And his conception of the cosmogony of creation

Is as wide as the buckle of Orion’s summer belt.

From the short story “Psyche and the Pskyscraper” by O. Henry