Give me back the grand delusion and let me be whole again.
I heard the old man speak and his tired blue eyes locked onto mine. I was completely unaware that the familiarity of his face should have alarmed me. He was one more of the wandering herd; the lost; the ignored; the irrelevant. He was one of those people I would give money to when I had it and who I would drink with when I didn’t. The thing most people don’t know and wouldn’t want to understand if they did know is this: every man only has a name when he talks to his mother or his wife, if he is lucky. The truth is that we gave up our names when we bought into the dream taught by American History textbooks and by preachers and by Wall Street Financiers. Verily I say: none of it matters. Because even though we are given names when we are born, people will label us for themselves and call us what they want, and those judgments carry over regardless of how far from the places of our births we roam. The moment we take back the power to name ourselves is the moment we are dead to the world; and while all the prestidigitating preachers got most of it wrong, there is one certain thing. Only in death are we complete.
And by the time I knew him by his blue eyes, he was lost in a crowd of laughter and of forgetfulness.
