we only live in the shadows

"but please do put everything away when you are done playing", i told her, as she busied herself with transforming the entire living room floor into a ship, using wooden bricks, vases, books, glass beads and every other imaginable object she would find around. 

"but i want to keep my ship here as it is, even as i am away at my grandparents'".

"no, this won't do - we will stumble upon these things, besides guests might come and then what".

"no problem, we will invite them onto the ship, no?"

"well..." - i wanted to say something but then i realized i didn't exactly find any tenable argument as to why we couldn't do that. she looked at me, then to her ship again, sprawling over the floor as we were speaking: 

"it is so boring to live as you do. your grown-up world is so boring. you only have rooms, and no ships hidden in them any longer". 

i couldn't make out the expression on her face when she said this, something between sadness and bewilderment. 

(perhaps it is true that, as we grow old, we only live in the shadows of what once was a luminous world filled with being)

because the earth is full of ancient rumour

Yes, and in that month when Proserpine comes back, and Ceres' dead heart rekindles, when all the woods are a tender smoky blur, and birds no bigger than a budding leaf dart through the singing trees, and when odorous tar comes spongy in the streets, and boys roll balls of it upon their tongues, and they are lumpy with tops and agated marbles...

and there is blasting thunder in the night, and the soaking millionfooted rain, and one looks out at morning on a stormy sky, a broken wrack of cloud; and when the mountain boy brings water to his kinsmen laying fence, and as the wind snakes through the grasses hears far in the valley below the long wail of the whistle, and the faint clangor of a bell...

and the blue great cup of the hills seems closer, nearer, for he had heard an inarticulate promise: he has been pierced by Spring, that sharp knife.

And life unscales its rusty weathered pelt, and earth wells out in tender exhaustless strength, and the cup of a man's heart runs over with dateless expectancy, tongueless promise, indefinable desire. Something gathers in the throat, something blinds him in the eyes, and faint and valorous horns sound through the earth.

The little girls trot pigtailed primly on their dutiful way to school; but the young gods loiter: they hear the reed, the oatenstop, the running goathoofs in the spongy wood, here, there, everywhere: they dawdle, listen, fleetest when they wait, go vaguely on to their one fixed home, because the earth is full of ancient rumor and they cannot find the way. All of the gods have lost the way.

from Look Homeward, Angel, by Thomas Wolfe