Lou Reed

Looking through my own life, I see I should have stayed more with the feelings I was having to see if I could see what was really there in those feelings and then to see if I could make something of what was really there.

And then when I did look through my life as I had lived it, it was like I was seeing a city like Naples or Palermo for the very first time on the last day I was there, and was vowing to come back sometime soon to see what I hadn't seen the first time.

At home, looking through the way I lived in those fabulous cities, I could see I'd taken far too many pictures and that all of them were of the wrong things, the things I could have seen at home had I been able to see them.

Why had I walked those beautiful twisted streets, past the great monuments of antiquity, past the faces of the descendents of The Emperors that I passed in the streets whose faces were so powerful and so sweet, to return with such small and dismal images that showed only what I thought had been made of the past and not the past itself?

Perhaps it was my way of reducing the present to a piece of corrugated industrial-strength aluminum on which the words of a real poet had once been written.

It's really sad when some people die and there's no one to take their place.