I read this beautiful article written by a friend of mine from Cape Town and thought I’d like to share it with you.
Enjoy X Alison
My Cape Times column 3/7/13 – Caspar Greeff
The old man and the machine
The old man was tired. He had worked hard. Toiled ceaselessly and selflessly. He had taken the raw substance of life and fashioned it into a thing of greatness. His life was his work and his work was his life and he had completed the task. He had mastered the task. He had done everything required of him. He had risen above everything that was required of him. His life was an act of nobility.
The old man was tired. He ached for rest with every atom of his being. He yearned for peace. He longed for sleep.
The old man had been a fighter. Always. He had fought for what he believed in. He had fought for freedom. For dignity. For forgiveness. He had fought against ignorance. Against hatred. Against oppression.
The old man had won most of his fights. All the ones that counted.
The old man was tired. But he couldn’t close his eyes. His eyelids were heavy. His eyelids were made of lead. His eyelids refused to shut.
He looked about him.
He was still in the same place. A place that was at the same time achingly familiar and terribly strange. The old man had been here for aeons. He had been here for an interminable time. Perhaps he had been here forever. He didn’t know. There were no days here. No nights either. It was always twilight. Or maybe dusk. There was no sun here. No moon. No stars.
There were hills. There was a word for these hills. Ummango. The word rolled like the hills themselves, the hills that were neither green nor brown, the hills that rolled and roiled like giant ripples in an endless dark sea.
Cattle wandered about. Nguni cows and bulls of many shades, dappled and splotched, haphazardly patterned. Behind them was a skinny boy with a stick. The boy raised the stick and yelled at the cattle. He ran at them and the cattle in front ran in the direction the boy wanted them to and the rest followed.
The old man recognised the skinny boy. “The child is the father of the man,” he thought. The old man tried to shout the boy’s name, but nothing came out his mouth. His tongue was paralysed. The old man waved at the skinny boy, but the boy just kept on running after the cattle. Waved his stick at the sky and yelled. There was a look of exhilaration on the boy’s face. Time was his ally, and an endless procession of days and nights lay ahead of him.
Again the old man tried to close his eyes and again he was unable.
In the distance a pinprick of light wavered, flickered, strengthened into a great fire. Men and women clad in blankets and hats appeared around the blaze. Children too. And babies.
The old man tried to focus his tired eyes. The people around the fire took shape. His father. His mother. Grandfathers, grandmothers. Uncles, aunts. Family. Some had been born many centuries ago. Some would be born hundreds of years in the future.
The old man’s family sang a song about the river that leaps down from the mountains and races through the valleys, seeks the sea, finds the ocean, and rises to the sky, becoming clouds, and then rain falling on the mountains again. Always seeking the sea.
The song soothed the old man’s tired mind, took the pain from his aching bones, put hope into his heart.
The old man closed his eyes.
When he opened them again he was in a brightly-lit room filled with green and red dots from machines that hummed gently. His wife was holding his hand.
“I love you,” she said.
The old man smiled at her.
“It’s time,” she said.
One by one the red and green lights went out. The machines stopped humming. Silence filled the room.
And then the singing. Songs of the forest, songs of the grasslands, of the rivers, of the animals, the birds, the insects. Songs of the sun and the moon and the stars and the heavens. Songs of joy.
The old man’s mother walked towards him. She embraced him.
“Welcome home,” she said.
Caspar Greeff
http://www.iol.co.za/capetimes/the-caspar-greeff-column-1.1535588#.UdYRGJM9F8E