I wish it was possible to ignore the world, to find some sort of sense in the hermitage of ignorance. I wish that silence gave me the pleasure that it once did … I’m not born for this new world. I live in a box but somehow bringing down the shutters and flooding it with artificial light doesn’t work for me … no matter how hard I try I can’t understand how it works.

This new world seems like a fantasy of hypocrisy .. and I say, ‘seems’ only because it’s not. I’m told this; this world is real. I’m told that its full of brightness and warmth. I’m told that it only feels dark and cold because I insist on wanting to view it with the values embedded in me from a mean and dark Old World, that I insist on wanting to go out into it and to participate. But you can’t participate in a closed off world and you can’t go home again to a place that no longer exists.

There was a time .. there was a time … What happened to the sunshine? When I was young we had summer, and summer was a time when one could run about and play. When I was young you could play in the streets and when I was young the parks weren’t littered with signs that said, No! You can’t. When I was young the parks and ovals weren’t littered. When I was young you could find other young people by just going down to the parks .. and you didn’t require supervision. Now the parks and the ovals are empty and it appears that not only do you require supervision – what a word, supervision .. now you can’t even break it down into its narrow parts without supervision – but there is always someone, someone who can’t remember when the parks and ovals had sunshine on them waiting to run up and tell you that you can’t participate in the open space because open space is a fearful place and that open space can be dangerous. And I suppose that’s true.

Everything is supposition and silence .. and secrecy. And you can’t go home again because it just isn’t there.

“It appears to me that they who in proof of any assertion rely simply on the weight of authority, without adducing any argument in support of it, act very absurdly – I wish to be allowed freely to question and freely to answer without any sort of adulation …” – Vincenzio Galilei.