Each man and woman is the light they know or recognize. Though it stoops and bends down to us from afar, like the fragrance of the flowers from the deserts of Uzbekistan or the outer reaches of a dark universe, it is we who make something out of it by tilting our heads to it, if at all, giving our assent or denials.

This slanting winter light, frozen light stream, from a half-dead mongrel sun, bristling with the expectant new year in its webbed refractions; this we hope will open us up to some perfect mystery, will clarify, still, moderate and reveal.

With age we move away from abstractions and hard-worn truths to something softer, gentler, less precise. There seems to be less time now to work things out, less space to shelter, and you think twice about reliving some old memory. The wind strikes up a note of discord, as events and unfinished business stack up against you. Nothing happens as you drift. And all this will be called a life by some, this slow accumulation and running down.

Pessoa wrote that he had lived a lot but not really lived.

There must be some form-perhaps it is described in some ancient text-of the life well lived? A way in which character takes shape and the scales fall.

The mud in the fields has hardened overnight, with nothing between it and the stars. There are small muddy puddles that resemble those in a village and the roads, too, seem to have become more earthy. You walk across the broken fields, without too many assumptions. Of all the hearts I have tried, I have found this winter one to be the most agreeable.

Warmth slips from my fingers, and on the road my eyes look out impassively at the passing world, just as my father's steely eyes would, almost without blinking, all those years ago. Across bridges, keeping up with the setting sun, or down country lanes to Cardiff, this is how we traversed the silence. 

Time has done its best and time has caught up with us. Streaks of rust on my silver buttons, the mind that cannot hold the line lingers in a daze. Your hands full of blemishes, barely imaginable a quarter of a century ago. You look without favour on younger people. What spring was sprung for this arrival? Uncalled for, and your own voice falters. A small semblance of order aimed at, like the terrace of your mind, some deep unknown strata of childhood memory caught in the fall of light. This light that falls on saints and traffic policeman alike, on the prostitutes in-between the acts, on the collectors of rubbish that sparkles like misplaced gold, and on their terrible hands, misshapen by fate.