Childlike Faith In Childhood's End Lyrics - 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 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, 

yetl 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