the other day someone gave me a copy of the poems of t.s. eliot and when i got a good look at the cover i shuddered and shuddered. you know most book covers show him in profile looking like an angry man in the middle of a fight but this one - he looks so painfully mortal and old and even a little ridiculous - like a little old man in his infirmity - a de facto lear at the middle of the play - there is something painful to look at in those furrowed brows and the way his lips were set i was suddenly seized with alarm. i have a sudden vision of all the world being old and broken. i feel like seizing ppl and saying will you please not grow old? i've felt that with all sorts of people even an old man once squatting by the roadside in hougang. i guess it's not even age, but how for one instant you see the lives of people at the most pathetic, infirm, inept - they don't even have to be doing anything - sometimes just one gesture or expression, the way the light falls, a word, a sudden flood of meaning - lighting and thunder and some veil did fall - and you see a picture for one painful instance and that image sums up a life - it makes you wonder what sort of cruel comedy we're all living out - i wonder how many times people have looked at me and suddenly thought the same - how can we bear this mortality - i feel old - i seem to have come to a halt, my mind stagnated. it's as though there is nowhere else to go but to hear your own footsteps - one, another, one, another, down down down. i am a fallen treetrunk, decaying by the roadside under the leaves.