Sunday

The Republic

4\21\04

I think I must have been quite drunk when I stumbled up to the top of a sand dune at midnight in White Sands to look at the stars and marvel at the expanse of desert, which, if you kept your back to the electric sprawl of Alamagordo in the East, was uninterrupted as far as the horizon. I had been pretending, during the daylight, that the four of us were the last people left alive after a nuclear holocaust, that we had finally emerged from a deep cave after years of hibernation, and were grimly aware of the desperate task that faced us, of picking up the pieces of a shattered world that was all sand and no water, and starting fresh, of creating civilization out of rocks and dry grass and four weary souls unused to the glare of the sun and the sting of the mosquitos and the scorpions. I thought of The Waste Land, and Stephen King's The Stand, and Mad Max: Escape from Thunderdome. But in the wind and the dark, the dunes seemed alien, otherworldly, and when I reached the peak, I was Luke Skywalker, looking up at the twin moons of Tatooine, mourning my aunt and uncle, but at the same time preparing to meet my destiny as hero of the rebel alliance. It occured to me that this was precisely why Plato kicked the poets out of the Republic.



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