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
Poetic Perspective!