Truncate

Suddenly the deluge of work strikes the quiet buffs of the banks, like a stormcloud from a blue horizon. One moment, a day clear as any, wild daisies dancing beneath a sky unfettered by cloud or kite, the next, vast white wreaths of wispy torment rush towards the lone man, a calvacade of celestial battalions, furious as the rage of gods.

Sorry. I know l love using imagery of sky and all that. The point is, why is there so much homework? The quantity of homework isn't the issue, it's the timing. Have you ever seen a garbage truck depositing its load of putrescent garbage onto a landfill? (I haven't, but it'll work as well, anyway.) This capricious cascade brings to mind that exact metaphor.

Another product of the exigencies of pioneering. The intellectual ferment dissolves into a flat, arid blandness, of the slogging masses in musclebound torment on the accreting, towering bulk of a Great Pyramid. What of those with unrealistic CCA committments? Will they drown, screams unheeded, in the Everest of paper piles? Will the erstwhile deities slow down the Earth's orbit, calm its spin, obliviate the scattering memories of confused calendar makers?

The itinerant wanderings of the mind are burdened with the army rucksack and the laptop of the thousand documents, with a silvered sword that cannot cut but is yet engraved with the memory of torment. Most tellingly, with the dreary drag of fixed smiles and thunderous, bored applause.

Back to the wondering questions of the soul on a beautiful blue morning, of golden sun, of chirping birds by a garden, of aquiline, sapphire sea and gentle breeze and the soft swaying of coconut trees by the shore; the rustling of silken sheets, the clink of a morning drink. But it's impossible to conceive of that eponymous beautiful morning, an unspoken name of sensuous beauty, when all you see before you is an unending paper pile, relic of cramming, the salt on the wound of deprivation.

Ah, the gorgeous West.