Second Stanza: [ACTION/WRITTEN/VOICE]

[burns_so_brightly]

[Sitting in the tea shop, Julian Bell is looking restless, his tea untouched and growing cold. He chews the end of his pen as his journal lies open on the table before him. All at once, he starts writing furiously.]

Expose the world, anatomize,
Strip clothes from skin, strip skin, then flesh, from bone.
Himself no surgeon, true, can sterilize,
But yet the self-infection can be shown.
Corrode and doubt; anesthetize the heart;
Morphia or curiosity drown the reviving smart.

Clear as white water in the stream we see
Shadowed the species of eternity;
The working process, self a working part:
For not one necessary fiction's grace
Can quite make mask th' observer's outward face,
Or thought one extra atom's movement start.

The moving pointer tells, and having told
Not the immediacy of hot and cold,
Nor yet the pale abstraction of a mind
(For algebra and instruments record
No immanent emergence of the Word.)
Tells solid, painful foothold all we find.

Why turn, why seek, why question for an end?
Why hope? Time flows: shows useless to defend
A cosy corner in the rising flood.
The tide is coming in: the dykes are down:
War, Terror, Poverty, swing through the town,
And the cold wind claims to be understood.

[It feels like it's been too long since he wrote. He's trying to get the juices going again, but this lazy, mind-numbing monotony of Luceti life is making it hard, so he started with something he's already written. Heck, maybe someone will give him feedback and he can better it. Some ten or fifteen minutes later, he picks up the journal and speaks.]

I think we should have a philosophy club here, or some such thing. Nothing exclusive, just a few inquisitive minds wanting intellectual stimulation. Mondays at eight in the tea shop. Any biters?

[OOC: Feel free to run into him around town as well as at the tea shop. He'll be getting groceries and checking out the library, and tonight, he'll be at Cloud Nine.

Also: the above poem was written by the actual Julian Bell and not me.  No profit made from it.]