Torschlusspanik

Chi m'a tolto a me stesso
Ch'a me fusse piu presso
O piu di me potessi, che poss' io.

Bulleh, who knows who I am?

I have come to think that life is a far more limited thing than those in the midst of its maelstrom realize. The light shines into the act of life for only the briefest moment- perhaps only a matter of seconds. Once it has gone and one has failed to grasp its offered revelation, there is no second chance. One may have to live the rest of one's life in hopeless depths of loneliness and remorse. In that twighlight world one can no longer look forward to anything. All that such a person holds in his hands is the withered corpse of what should have been.
------Murakami, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle

Before one knows it one gets the feeling that certain lives have slipped away, as if from the dense knot of being one had only unraveled a certain thread, leaving the other, cancelled versions of our selves, in a state of cold limbo. Bi-location: the desire to be in more than one place at the same time, to be more than one-self, to surpass the narrow horizons of time that delimit a particular style of soul. We desire contradictory things: often rounded, always open (Goethe)...a broken circle, a script that is continuously being re-written. Nothing oppresses us more than the idea that things had to be the way they are, that certain doors will forever be closed to us.

The modern sensibility is nothing but a revolt against all that is 'given,' of any notion of a fixed identity. But we delight in and mourn the fact that we are unknown to ourselves and others. And this in itself is not so strange: Zeus wants to and does not want to be named.

The being between birth and death scrawls -in matter and in events- a pattern which, taken as a whole, expresses his unique identity. This man is not a sealed personality moving through an alien environment. He is the sum total of all that he does and all that happens to him and all that comes within his range, spread out (from our point of view) in time and space, but a single, timeless fact in the mind of God. What we are and where we are cannot ultimately be divided...In the last resort, a man looks at the love or anger within him and says, So this is me. Looks at his withered hand or the garden he has planted and says, So this is me. Looks finally upon his enemy and his death and says, So this is me. And in acknowledging so much that is part of ourselves (since our boundaries extend to the furthest horizons...) we make an act of recognition which actualises what was inherent in us from the start...recognising our name-tag on everything that comes our way. But the part of us that is our destiny, streaming in upon us from the 'outside' events through the course of time can be recognised as belonging to our own particular pattern only when it has happened.
---Gai Eaton, King of the Castle.