The Fall of Knowledge

Perhaps knowledge and truth are built
much in the way a city is. At first you
have naked land, true nature. A
frontiersman comes along with a vision,
exploration in his bones, creation in
his heart. Within this landscape he
perceives the chimirical structuring of
a castle; a homestead, that he can carve
from the rocks and bend from the trees.
This enthusiasm and vigor adds an energy
to the landscape and where rolling hills
once slept, new outcroppings of designed
discovery emerge. The fresh clear taste
of nature pours through and about the
cracks of integrity, and our
frontiersman's dream scene grows beneath
the trees. His clear integrity molds
straight walls and swept paddocks. His
fields gracefully merge into mowed
pastures and then cultivated flora. The
wild oat beauty of this soil anchoring
man and his domesticating success
attracts those subtly less adventurous
bodies to settle in some roots too. The
population grows slowly, against the
harsher wilds of the land, until its
seemingly non-existent progress adds up
over time. Where our frontiersman's
house once sat, we see a fair sized
town, mildly prosperous, and no longer
on the edge of the wild. The soil is
subtly less rich but well nurtured into
cultivated order, it's time for a larger
government to take an interest. The
buildings in the center heighten by a
story or two, while those on the fringe
spread out. A city housing thousands
stands tall, modern, a center of
culture, cultivated humans line streets
hundreds of years old, covering our
rolling hills with tracks and business.
The frontiersman's vision has long since
moved on to new frontiers. The
metropolis finds it more efficient to
start demolition and reconstruction,
then to build new shiny structures.
Land becomes a premium, and freedom a
dream. Creativity has refocused into
criticism and analyzing the past. Old
buildings find ever new functions, and
architects specialize in renovation.
Young people are taught the sentiment
towards age that seems necessary to
prevent them listening to the more
barbaric frontiersman call of their
blood. The cities' main functions are
driven by self-cannibalism. The people
inside cannot see out.

Copyright © 1992 Carolyn L Burke

Carolyn's Diary
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