Argument Quote by John Koethe

““Argument in Isolation" Premise: one exists alone, Within a system of increasingly mild ideals —The good of love, the greater good of dreams— Abstracted from the musings of the grown-up child That somewhere, in a scene above the sky, Lies smiling. Anxious to begin Before the will can answer and its passions fly away Like sparrows, he lays aside his cares and Lets the world come, lets its shapes return, Its mirrors answer and its angels roam across the narrow Confines of the page. Like friends Estranged by distance and the inwardness of age, The spaces between letters become spaces between lives, The fact of pain begins to seem unreal, the trees Begin to seem too distant; the imaginary self, Concealed from the world, begins its cry Yet remains empty—as though it could contain No tenderness beyond its own, and no other love Than that concealed in its own reflection, hovering On the threshold of age, between two lives. Premise: the world and the mind are one, With a single splendor. And to By the way a Street looked, or the way the light fell in a canyon, Is to realize the way time feels in passing, as The will to change becomes the effort to remember, And then a passive sigh. An eidolon Constructed out of air, grown out of nothing, Planted at the center of a space shaped like the heart””

— John Koethe