Freedom

“Good luck to the farmer!  Good luck to the man who owns this place, the man who works it, the faithful, the virtuous!  I can love him, I can revere him.  I can envy him.  But I have wasted half my life trying to live his life.  I wanted to be something that I was not.  I even wanted to be a poet and a middle-class person at the same time.  I wanted to be an artist and a man of fantasy, but I also wanted to be a good man, a man at home.  It all went on for a long time, till I knew that a man cannot be both and have both, that I am a nomad and not a farmer, a man who searches and not a man who keeps.  A long time I castigated myself before gods and laws which were only idols for me.  That was what I did wrong, my anguish, my complicity in the world’s pain.  I increased the world’s guilt and anguish, by doing violence to myself, by not daring to walk toward my own salvation.  The way to salvation leads neither to the left nor the right:  it leads into your own heart, and there alone is God, and there alone is peace.”   -    an extract from “Wandering” by Herman Hesse

                                  

Tom Waits reads Charles Bukowski