“The sky here’s very strange. I often have the sensation when I look at it that it’s a solid thing up there, protecting us from what’s behind … [from] nothing, I suppose. Just darkness. Absolute night.”
—Paul Bowles, from The Sheltering Sky (John Lehmann, 1949)
With thanks to the jewel that is apoetreflects.
Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four, five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps 20. And yet it all seems limitless.
The sky hides the night behind it, and shelters the people beneath from the horror that lies above.
There are mornings when, from the first ray of light seized upon by the eye, and the first simple sounds that get inside the head, the heart is convinced that it is existing in rhythm to a kind of unheard music, familiar but forgotten because long ago it was interrupted and only now has suddenly resumed playing. The silent melodies pass through the fabric of the consciousness like the wind through the meshes of a net, without moving it, but at the same time unmistakably there, all around it. For one who has never lived such a morning its advent can be a paralyzing experience.
