VV(13) - Dreams Tonight Will Shelter You

[David Morris]

Mondaugen sings a lullaby to the feeble Godolphin collapsed in Mondaugen's 
turret bed.  Dreams and childhood are here linked.  It is a beautiful song, 
both despairing and holding on to the possibility of magic.  Old Godolphin 
earlier speaking to Vera puts forth an argument for moving beyond the 
indulgences of days gone by:

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(248)  Godolphin laughed at her.  "There's been a war, Fraulein.  Vheissu 
was a luxury, an indulgence.  We can no longer afford the likes of Vheissu."
   "But the need," she protested, "its void.  What can fill that?"
   He cocked his head and grinned at her.  ""What is already filling it.  
The real thing.  Unfortunately."
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"The real thing."  Wasn't that a Coke ad?  One might ask which is more 
"real," the need or the "real thing."  But here also I think Childhood & 
Dreams are invoked as predecessors to Adulthood and responsibility.

1Cr 13:11   When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, 
I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

"Humanity" is later linked to Childhood & Dreams in a passage where the loss 
of humanity is seen as the inevitable result of "civilization" confronted 
with the reality of the only thing that is the case:  the world:

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(273)  the engineering design for a world he knew with numb leeriness 
nothing could now keep from becoming a reality, a world whose full despair 
he, at the vantage of eighteen years later, couldn't even find adequate 
parables for [...] where finally humanity was reduced out of necessity [...] 
out of a confrontation the young of one's contemporaries, God help them, had 
yet to make,  humanity was reduced to a nervous, disquieted, forever 
inadequate but indissoluble Popular Front against [...] the frightening but 
necessary cry of the strand wolf in the fog.
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DM

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