Tens of thousands of people demonstrate outside the Bank of England in central London, calling for action on poverty, climate change and jobs ahead of the G-20 summit. Photo by Antonio Lopes.
The short form of "not rich" is "poor".
What close company gentility and paraphrase keep!
Let us speak not of the want of necessaries. Enough has been said--that is, not enough--of the want of necessaries.
Many feel it openly, many feel it secretly, many, having been laid off, conceal from others the curious feeling of flotation or free-fall they sense themselves tumbling into, like deep sea divers whose life cords have been cut. They sit in their SUVs listening on headphones to their favourite Grateful Dead song of yesteryear, rather than go inside and face the wife and young child and the mortgage payments, after having been brought by the American Dream to this threshold of agony and near compassion. Having a "good job..." and then being "laid off..."
Hope and fear, poverty and riches, dinner and breakfast, clouds and the simulacra-dawn of the lit-up box, as at Delphi once the oracle. My surveys of life have not informed me of more. The milder degrees of poverty of imagination are supported by hope, one must allow that. Yet how pathetic really, hope, would not the time better have been spent some other way?
Life must be seen before it can be known but we are as the blind, before our lit-up boxes, where then are our probing-sticks, to tap our way forward toward Ash Wednesday?
This imagination that life is easy to be borne, where does it come from?
The poor do not stand on ceremony over a little civility, nor does the mutilation of a compliment bring them low. They are as we are, we are as they are, but pincers are tearing at our flesh.
We feel the exposure, we feel the pain, but the poor keep coming on in waves, we feel defenseless, moreover they are us.
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