Childlike Faith In Childhood’s End(2000 Digital Remaster) - 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