Childlike Faith In Childhood's End - Van Der Graaf Generator

Existence is a stage on which we pass

A sleepwalk trick for mind and heart;

It’s hopeless, I know, but onward I must go

And try to make a start

At seeing something more

Than day to day survival, chased by final death

If I believed this the sum of the life to which we’ve come

I wouldn’t waste my breath

Somehow, there must be more

There was a time when more was felt than known

But now, entrenched inside my sett

In light more mundane, thought rattles round my brain:

We live, we die… and yet?

In the beginning there was order and destiny

But now that path has reached the border

And on our knees is no way to face the future, whatever it be

Though the forces which hold us in place

Last through eons in unruffled grace

We, too, wear the face of creation

As anti-matter sucks and pulses periodically

The bud unfolds, the bloom is dead, all space is living history

It seems as though time must betray us yet we’re alive

And though I see no God to save us, still we survive

Through the centuries of progress

Which don’t get us very far

All illusion!

All is bogus…

We don’t yet know what we are

Laughing, hoping, praying, joking, Son of Man

With lowered eyes but lifting hearts, we’re grains of sand

And though, in time, the sea may claim us for its own

We are the rocks which root the future — on us it grows!

We might not be there to share it

If eternity’s a jest but I think that I can bear it

If the next life is the best

Even if there is a heaven when we die

Endless bliss would be as meaningless as the lie

That always comes as answer to the question

«Why do we see through the eyes of creation?»

Adrift without a course

It’s very lonely here

Our only conjecture

What lies behind the dark

Still, I find I can cling to a lifeline

Think of a lifetime which means more than my own one

Dreams of a grander thing than we are

Time and Space hang heavy on my shoulders…

When all life is over who can say

No mutated force shall remain?

Though the towers of the city are denied to we men of clay

Still we know we shall scale the heights some day

Frightened in the silence, frightened, but thinking very hard

Let us make computations of the stars

Older, wiser, sadder, blinder, watch us run:

Faster, longer, harder, stronger, now it comes…

Colour blisters, image splinters gravitate

Towards the centre, in final splendour disintegrate

The universe now beckons

And Man, too, must take His place;

Just a few last fleeting seconds

To wander in the waste

And the children who were ourselves move on

Reincarnation stills its now perfected song

And at last we are free of the bonds of creation

All the jokers and gaolers, all the junkies and slavers too

All the throng who have danced a merry tune…

Human we can all be, but Humanity we must rise above

In the name of all faith and hope and love

There’s a time for all pilgrims, and a time for the fakers too

There’s a time when we all will stand alone and nude

Naked to the galaxies… naked, but clothed in the overview:

As we reach Childhood’s End we must start anew

And though dark is the highway

And the peak’s distance breaks my heart

For I never shall see it, still I play my part

Believing that what waits for us

Is the cosmos compared to the dust of the past

In the death of mere Humans Life shall start!