Footsteps

I am reading a book that I had read once before a few years ago, The Razor’s Edge (Somerset Maugham):

“I couldn’t make head or tail of him. When wine had loosened his tongue and he spoke of the Ineffable, he shed the rough obscene language that he ordinarily used, like the grimy overalls he wore in the mine, and he was well spoken and even eloquent. I couldn’t believe he wasn’t sincere. I don’t know how it occurred to me, but I got the idea somehow that he’d taken that hard, brutal labour of the mine to mortify his flesh. I thought he hated that great, uncouth body of his and wanted to torture it and that his cheating and his bitterness and his cruelty were the revolt of his will against – oh, I don’t know what’d call it – against deep-rooted instinct of holiness, against a desire for God that terrified and yet obsessed him.”

5.06 am (Every Stranger's Eyes)

[Waitress:] "Hello, you wanna cup of coffee?"
[Customers:] "Heh, Turn that fucking juke box down
You want to turn down that juke box....loud in here"
[Waitress:] "I'm sorry, would you like a cup of coffee?
Ok, you take cream and sugar? Sure."

In truck stops and hamburger joints
In Cadillac limousines
In the company of has-beens
And bent-backs
And sleeping forms on pavement steps
In libraries and railway stations
In books and banks
In the pages of history
In suicidal cavalry attacks
I recognise...
Myself in every stranger's eyes

And in wheelchairs by monuments
Under tube trains and commuter accidents
In council care and county courts
At Easter fairs and sea-side resorts
In drawing rooms and city morgues
In award winning photographs
Of life rafts on the China seas
In transit camps, under arc lamps
On unloading ramps
In faces blurred by rubber stamps
I recognise...
Myself in every stranger's eyes

And now, from where I stand
Upon this hill
I plundered from the pool
I look around
I search the skies
I shade my eyes
So nearly blind
And I see signs of half remembered days
I hear bells that chime in strange familiar ways
I recognise...
The hope you kindle in your eyes

It's oh so easy now
As we lie here in the dark
Nothing interferes, it's obvious
How to beat the tears
That threaten to snuff out
The spark of our love

Roger Waters - The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking

It is a while that this feeling is with me that John Kerry will win the 2004 US presidential elections. And when this happens, the US will have one of its best presidents in the span of my life so far--after all whoever succeeds George W. Bush would look better.