The Foreword to the new book “The Wisdom of Our Ancestors: Conservative Humanism and the Western Tradition.”
Silverfish
October 8, 2014
The silverfish, unable to crawl up
The steep, cool porcelain walls,
Goes round and round the oblong
Until I turn on the water and it spins,
Scrambling furiously, down the bathtub drain
Into the secret night of this house from which
It appeared, looking for I know not what,
For light maybe,
But not certainly this brutal, careless drowning.
The silverfish doesn’t know anything—
Doesn’t know it repulses the world around it,
The human world that means nothing,
Not even the hand reaching out for the faucet
Or the hint of fear it creates with all its legs
Propelling it into the orifices of the imagination,
The mind’s basement into which all things go—
From which all things come.
—Robert Champ
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