·
I want to hear the one thing speak that
cannot speak.
I want to know the things that can’t be known.
I want to speak only here in his closed book.
To hear those sorts of things said, that can
only be spoken in this sort of closed silence.
When the rest of the world is not awake to any
of this, and I also would rather be sleeping.
The wind making its marks on the other side of day.
And the crystal only keeping its lights, to itself.
And to me.
“The ultimate meaning of the angry young man is not known. What is known is the shape of his greatest fear — that all of his efforts, from learning to speak to learning to write, to write well, to write badly, to write angrily, from learning to despise to learning to abominate, to abominate well, to abominate badly, to abominate abominably, to rant, to fulminate, to shout down the sea, to age, to age gracefully, to age awkwardly, to age at all, to think, to regret, to list himself in the newspapers under ‘Lost and Found,’ might culminate in this: a roaring, raging, crazy mad passionate bibliography.”
Donald Barthelme | “The Angry Young Man”