The Clanging Dementia of Silence
All in a row, they are wordless, pensive, waiting, until a man bearing a voice of Shakespearean pretense gives call to them, and then they are still wordless, pensive, waiting, but they are as an assembly line of thought, arms poised, legs crossed, feet slowly tapping, turning, easing with absent minded regularity into the dark wooden niche of their chairs, urging on the swelling apparition of thought, which spills forth from the simmering bellows of their minds to fill the room with his electric intensity. And it is as their apparition begins to push against the cramped cornices of the room that they are left to his heat, the squelching, suffocating heat of thought which gives fuel to their earnest design, their creation, their God, and it is as their Titan begins to lift the burdensome ceiling from his shoulders that the lecturer’s words, which once gave fuel to their intellectual endeavor, are finally reduced gentle proddings as they are thrown ineffectually against their great, smoky apparition. And then all the heated airs are swallowed up into the sky’s chilly gait, and they are left only with clanging dementia of silence.