A SOLILOQUY
By Hollis E. Suits 1960


With nature’s urges satisfiedall genera can rest content excepting Manfor he has been endowed with mind and has no respite from its thought in all his waking life.

It drives him at his work and play,
it leads him through a labyrinth of hope and fear,
induces him to ponder over death
and thence to meditate
upon his origin and destiny.

What IS that subtle power that we call mind?

It waked a hominoid from his unconsciousness
and lifted him into a realm apart
from his progenitors.It plays upon his vocal cords
and causes them to sound
those epoch marking words – I AM.

It gave him power to overcome
the lion and the mastodon,
to soar upon the stratosphere
and delve the ocean floor,
to cast his presence and his voice around the world
and hang new stars upon the firmament.

In truth, the mind of man imbues him with
unquenchable desire to be as God and yet
it looks askance upon his animality
as if he were a schizophrene.

And hence the genus homo meditates,
philosophizes and religionates
in grave endeavor to divine
the essence of that noumenon
that he is wont to call his mind.

His quest is not for a computer
made of mortal cells
but for that conscious entity that reads the dial
and then deliberates.

Is that also made of mortal cells
and destined to decay
or could it be the embryo
of a celestial soul?

And thus throughout millenniums
the genus homo meditates.

Thad's comment on the Soliloquy

He spent two years working on the soliloquy between 1958 and 1960. He fought over every detail, every bit of word usage....it had to be exactly what he had in mind. I find it a handsome and meaningful statement...his unified field theory.

Now and then he would, as you may recall, invent a word that he needed to express a special thought. His "religionate" is not, as far as I can tell, in any dictionary but he needed it for what he had in mind. By coincidence I am currently studying the language of Thomas Carlyle whose language usage is sometimes horrendously invented and personal. When a friend criticized him for making up words he said that he had to because there were no words in current usage that would express what he wanted.