fiefoe

<'The past beats inside me like a second heart.'>

So much of life was stillness then, when we were young, or so it seems now; a biding stillness; a vigilance.
Sickness in those days was a special place, a place apart, where no one else could enter... It is a place like the place were I feel that I am now, miles from anywhere, and anyone.
This is what I thought adulthood would be, a kind of long indian summer, a state of tranquility, of calm incuriousness, with nothing left of the barely bearable raw immediacy of childhood.
Happiness was different in childhood. It was so much then a matter simply of accumulation, of taking things - new experiences, new emotions - and applying them like so many polished tiles to what would someday be the marvellously finished pavilion of the self.
What in my imaginings was to come was in reality already gone. .. Was it actually the future I was looking forward to, or something beyond the future?

But then, at what moment, of all our moments, is life not utterly, utterly changed, until the final, most momentous change of all?
And yet, what existence, really, does it have, the past? After all, it is only what the presence was, once, the present that is gone, no more than that. And yet.
Up to now all her experiences had been temporary. Griefs had been assuaged, if only by time, joys had hardened into habit.
She is in my memory her own avatar. ..No doubt for others elsewhere she persists, a moving figure in the waxworks of memory, but their version will be different from mine, and from each others.
I experienced a sense almost of panic as the real, the crassly complacent real, took hold of the things I thought I remembered and shook them into its own shape.
Really, one might almost live one's life over, if only one could make a sufficient effort of recollection.
Memory dislikes motion, preferring to hold things still.

"The Sea"