We Are Part Of A Mystery, A

Then There Is The Matter Of My Mother's Abandonment Of Me. Again, This Is The Common Experience. They Walk Ahead Of Us, And Walk Too Fast, And Forget Us, They Are So Lost In Thoughts Of Their Own, And Soon Or Late They Disappear. The Only Mystery Is That We Expect It To Be Otherwise.

There Is A Saying That To Understand Is To Forgive, But That Is An Error, So Papa Used To Say. You Must Forgive In Order To Understand. Until You Forgive, You Defend Yourself Against The Possibility Of Understanding. ... If You Forgive, He Would Say, You May Indeed Still Not Understand, But You Will Be Ready To Understand, And That Is The Posture Of Grace.

It Was A Source Of Both Terror And Comfort To Me Then That I Often Seemed Invisible - Incompletely And Minimally Existent, In Fact. It Seemed To Me That I Made No Impact On The World, And That In Exchange I Was Privileged To Watch It Unawares.

Every Single One Of Us Is A Little Civilization Built On The Ruins Of Any Number Of Preceding Civilizations, But With Our Own Variant Notions Of What Is Beautiful And What Is Acceptable - Which, I Haste To Add, We Generally Do Not Satisfy And By Which We Struggle To Live.

There Is So Little To Remember Of Anyone - An Anecdote, A Conversation At A Table. But Every Memory Is Turned Over And Over Again, Every Word, However Chance, Written In The Heart In The Hope That Memory Will Fulfill Itself, And Become Flesh, And That The Wanderers Will Find A Way Home, And The Perished, Whose Lack We Always Feel, Will Step Through The Door Finally And Stroke Our Hair With Dreaming Habitual Fondness Not Having Meant To Keep Us Waiting Long.