Epigraph

Clock time is our bank manager,

tax collector, police inspector;

this inner time is our wife.



— J. B. PRIESTLEY,

Man and Time Love After Love



The time will come

when, with elation,

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror,

and each will smile at the other's welcome,



and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you



all your life, whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,



the photographs, the desperate notes

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life.



—DEREK WALCOTT

Oh not because happiness exists,

that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss. But because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, in which some strange way keeps calling us. Us, the most fleeting of all. . . . Ah, but what can we take along

into that other real? Not the art of looking,

which is learned so slowly, and nothing that happened here. Nothing.

The sufferings, then. And, above all, the heaviness,

and the long experience of love,—just what is wholly

unsayable.



—from The Ninth Duino Elegy, RAINER MARIA RILKE,

translated by STEPHEN MITCHELL