Poetry

Sometimes when I'm reading, I come across a phrase with a beauty that strikes me, and takes me out of the reading experience. Sometimes it makes me contemplative, other times sad, or emotionally in sync with the author.

While reading World Made By Hand, I encountered one of these phrases:

"The old high school complex itself was a 1970's-vintage modernist monstrosity, a U-shaped set of low-slung rectilinear boxes like ten thousand other schools around the nation from the period. Seeing the building usually made me deeply sad and even a little angry, the way that refrigerator in my garden did. Its vision of yesterday's tomorrow seemed pitiful."

It's vision of yesterday's tomorrow...

It's such an evocative phrase. It made me stop and think - what will tomorrow's people think of our vision of their present? What visions do we have today of our tomorrows that are similarly pitiful? How can we as humanity rise above the limitations we set for ourselves, and the restricted futures we dream of?