Childlike Faith in Childhood's End (New stereo mix 2021) Songtext
von Van der Graaf Generator

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 set
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 aeons in unruffled grace
We, too, wear the face of creation

As anti-matter sucks and passes 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 cause to save us, yet we survive
Through the centuries of progress which don't get us very far
All illusion, all in focus, we don′t yet know what we are

Laughing, hoping, praying, joking son of man
With lowered eyes but lifting hearts with 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 dress
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 spaceHeavy 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 our mutations of the stars
Older, wiser, sadder, blinder, watch us run
Faster, longer, harder, stronger, now it comes
Colder, blisters, inner splinters, gravitate
Towards the centre, heat final, splendour, disintegrate
Oh, the universe now beckons
And man too must take his place
Just a few last fleeting seconds
To wander in the waves
And the children who were ourselves move on
The incarnation stills its now perfected song
And at last we are free of the bonds
Our creations
All the jokers and jailers
All the junkies and slavers too
All the proud who have danced the 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 our heights and we 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
And the death of mere human life shall start