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“… and the place thereof shall know it no more.” That line has haunted me down the years. I know the scene well, having visited it many times in troubled dreams. The weed-grown barnyard where none have dwelled since the ploughman departed, sunlit with the uncanny silence of dreams. The sunshine of waking hours is alive with the buzzing of insects, the song of birds, and the sound of the brook. In dreams one walks in silence. My tread makes no noise; I cannot hear my heart beating. The stone barn faces me, its whitewash long since faded to an indistinct tan. The weathered door hangs ajar, crooked on one hinge. No one has passed through its opening in all these years. It is overgrown with wild roses glowing red in the sunlight against the darkness within. It is the screen of roses from the ageless tales my mother once heard from her mother and told me in her turn, in another life, before the war, while the world was still young. It is all so familiar, yet nothing welcomes me. I have returned, and I am a stranger. And the place thereof shall know it no more.
That fragment of the 103d Psalm is three millenia old. Yet I have seen it written on the blank faces of subway riders warily assessing the strangers with whom they daily share this car. I have seen it written on the faces of parents trying to understand what has become of the children to whom they wanted to give their hard-earned world —and on the faces of those children, living in a wholly different world for which their parents could not prepare them. We, the people, we who have everything, we who are the envy of the world, are a people whose place knows us no more —and who, bewildered by its unwelcoming familiarity, do not know our place. Yet has it ever been otherwise?
Something within us wants to protest that this is not as it ought