the inheritance of grey

"Once again this is not so much about the content students prefer-Facebook, YouTube, etc.-or whether they use the Web for homework or not. It is about the reading styles they employ. They race across the surface dicing language and ideas into bullets and graphics, seeking whatever they already want and shunning the rest they convert history, philosophy, literature, civics, and fine art into information to retrieve and pass along."

the end of the book, the end of words, doesn't trouble you too much. you won't be around anyway. but today, weighed down by the solid grey skies, you find an old photo album to pass the time (yeah, ironic, i know). some of the images have thinned out so much that it's as if the person's body is in the very process of dissolution, a great disappearing act if ever there was (excepting God's); in others, bright light-from god knows where-has invaded...sometimes it is a series of blotches, in others a streak of dazzling white light; the contours of some faces have become blurred, less distinct... "this is what we were, this is what we are. and you can do nothing to stop it."

the close hours before us, the days from far beyond. "tell me their Real Names." Then you learned how the silver inherited the black. the shadows, even then. car doors casually left open, hands in pockets, we look in different directions, dazed.

So, even when you've forgotten some words and the images fade to the blank background from which they once emerged, trembling and new, there'll still be gentle words, and images of loved ones, somewhere in the stillness of your heart, there to be retrieved and passed along. the things between us,

things not to be said
things for keeping, that can keep the small-hours gaze
open and steady...
that we've been true to.
a thing allowed.
---seamus heaney.