#487...a late night passage...

 

Soon the child's clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions,
preconceptions and abstractions.  Simple free [being]
becomes encrusted with the burdensome armor of the ego.
Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense
of mystery has been withdrawn.  The sun glints throught the pines,
and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain,
like a memory in paradise.  After that day....we become seekers.

~Peter Matthiessen (b. 1927)
American writer