''Earlier poets might have retorted — rather obviously — that when they sang, the myths were a matter of common knowledge, common to them and to their audiences. Present-day poets, however, cannot offer this retort because, for some unhappy reason, the knowledge has ceased to be common. The twilight of the gods has deepened into almost total darkness.
''In the sophisticated Roman days of the Emperor Tiberius there came an Egyptian sailor to Rome with a tale that on his voyage he had heard a strange voice off the islands of Paxi calling on him to proclaim: ''The great god Pan is dead!'' What if, in this our more sophisticated day, preoccupied as we are with science and material things, great Pan really is dead?
''Yet Pan was still alive to the poet Keats, who prays to him:
'Be thou the unimaginable lodge
For solitary thinkings; such as dodge
Conception to the very bourne of heaven,
Then leave the naked brain: be still the leaven
That spreading in this dull and clodded earth
Gives it a touch ethereal — a new birth:
Be still a symbol of immensity,
A firmament reflected in a sea;
An element filling the space between;
An unknown.''
And now: Kool-Aid!
THE TEASE!
Cryptic crumbs torn from the crust of tonight's episode — ''crumbs,'' because we know it doesn't take much to get you psyched for Lost. And because we are stingy. It's the recession, dude!
Episode 3 of season 5 is entitled ''Jughead.'' Wikipedia tells us that the word ''Jughead'' can refer to many things. Jughead can refer to a search engine. So maybe ''Jughead'' means that the Island is zipping through the world wide web of time looking for something. (Free amateur porn, probably. Naughty Island!) Jughead also can refer to a progressive rock band founded by Ty Tabor, also the lead singer of the Christian prog-rock band King's X, whose first album, Out of the Silent Planet, was named after a science fiction book by Lost-linked author, C.S. Lewis. And Jughead can refer to the Canadian name for the Kool-Aid mascot, that half-man, half-pitcher creature that smashes through walls and growls ''Oh yeaah!'' Kinda like Smokey:
Of course, Jughead also refers to the Archie Comics character of the same name. Curious fellow, this Jughead. For quite a while, nobody knew his real first name. Kept it a secret. Ironically, in tonight's episode, you will meet two characters whose first names are deliberately withheld from us until late in the hour. One made me gasp; the other made me get all misty. Jughead also wore a sweatshirt with the letter ''S'' on the front, and I'm told that for many years, the comics kept the significance of this conspicuous detail as secret. I'm really no Archie fan, so I can't tell you what the 'S' stands for... but I'm going take a stab and say it's not Smokey.
NEXT PAGE: The great smokey dragon of Lost
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