Childlike Faith In Childhood's End lyrics

Song information

Artist: Van Der Graaf Generator
Album: Still Life

Lyrics

(Hammill)

Existence is a stage on which we pass
A sleepwalk trick for mind and heart:
It's hopeless, I know
But onward I must go
And try to make a start
At seeing something more than day-to-day
Survival chased by final death
If I believed this the sum
Of the life to which we've come
I wouldn't waste my breath
Somehow, there must be more
There was a time when more was felt than
Known
But now, entrenched inside my sett
In light more mundane, thought rattles round
My brain:
We live, we die...and yet?

In the beginning there was order and destiny
But now that path has reached the border, and
On our knees
Is no way to face the future, whatever it be
Though the forces which hold us in place
Last through eons in unruffled grace
We, too, wear the face of creation

As anti-matter sucks and pulses periodically
The bud unfolds, the bloom is dead, all space
Is living history
It seems as though time must betray us, yet
We're alive
And though I see no god to save us still we
Survive
Through the centuries of progress
Which don't get us very far
All illusion! all is bogus-
We don't yet know what we are..
Laughing, hoping, praying, joking, son of man!
With lowered eyes but lifting hearts, we're
Grains of sand
And though, in time, the sea may claim us for
Its own
We are the rocks which root the future - on us
It grows!

We might not be there to share it
If eternity's a jest
But I think that I can bear it
If the next life is the best
Even if there is a heaven when we die
Endless bliss would be as meaningless as the lie
That always comes as answer to the question
"Why do we see through the eyes of creation?"

Adrift without a course, it's very lonely here
Our only conjecture what lies behind the dark
Still, I find I can cling to a lifeline
Think of a lifetime which means more
Than my own one-
Dreams of a grander thing than we are
Time and space hang heavy on my shoulders:
When all life is over who can say
No mutated force shall remain?
Though the towers of the city are denied to we
Men of clay
Still we know we shall scale the heights some
Day
Frightened in the silence-
Frightened, but thinking very hard
Let us make computations of the stars

Older, wiser, sadder, blinder, watch us run;
Faster, longer, harder, stronger, now it comes:
Colour blisters, image splinters gravitate
Towards the centre, in final splendour
Disintegrate
The universe now beckons
And man, too, must take his place..
Just a few last fleeting seconds
To wander in the waste
And the children who were ourselves move on
Reincarnation stills its now perfected song
And at last we are free of the bonds of creation

All the jokers and gaolers, all the junkies and
Slavers too
All the throng who have danced a merry tune-
Human we can all be
But humanity we must rise above
In the name of all faith and hope and love
There's a time for all pilgrims, and a time for
The fakers too
There's a time when we all will stand alone and
Nude;
Naked to the galaxies-
Naked, but clothed in the overview..
As we reach childhood's end we must start anew

And though dark is the highway
And the peak's distance breaks my heart
For I never shall see it, still I play my part
Believing that what waits for us
Is the cosmos compared to the dust of the
Past..
In the death of mere humans life shall start!