Part 4

WORLD OF TOMORROW

Whereless in a sea of space, how shall we reckon with the dead whose graves we marked on a shifting land and left at a distance travelled by light? What pilot navigates our course through a finite but expanding void no almanac explains or chart defines?

Sun, stars, birds, nothing avails since Phoenician and Viking passed with cross-staff, astrolabe and compass to bring us to shores we have left behind. We are speeding our unborn young to harbors no heard voice guides us toward, no radar yet detects, no octant sights.

Now new dimensions of mind extend the geometric skull of Ptolemy and Euclid, of occult priest and philosopher, to measure time not by the sun's zenith at noon or the moon's eclipse, but by spectra through which we can identify time's white.

Past and present, both are blind to the future, while the Sphinx waits for another Oedipus. O waste of sand and wind, swept by an airborne tide! Shall we find a snakeless Eden and with the apples unforbidden begin our second exodus, from Paradise?

This first edition was completed in May 1964. The poems were set in 14 pt. Centaur by Mackenzie & Harris, Inc. and printed by Bradley Brownell in the shop of Van Riper & Thompson, Inc. on Curtis Colophon text. Bound by the Santa Barbara Bindery Designed and illustrated by Wayne Thompson

Van Riper & Thompson, Inc. 703 Anacapa Street Santa Barbara, California

End of Project Gutenberg's It Takes Practice Not To Die, by Elizabeth Bartlett