'But thought's the slave of life, and life, time's fool

And Time, that takes survey of all the world, 

Must have a stop.' 

The sheer impossibility of imagining another's life. A photograph, a glimmering sentence in a novel, a turn of phrase in a poem, nothing too close. A pause, an interval, is what we perhaps were really after all this time. But the ordinariness of suffering, the idiocy, the petty and great hatreds that are a recurrent feature of human history, the way in which the whole bundle is in some sense what constitutes 'the world'; that, even after all these years, continues to startle. The way in which things go on without us, how everyone misunderstands the other, how no-one ever actually stops to see and take in a tree, another human being, a star. It does make you occasionally wonder if this is all little more than a brief and strange farce. People, they do come and go. 

The Allama's complaint: God, either take away our consciousness or give us greater power.

It is as if there is a witness to our lives, a mirror in which we would see ourselves whole, complete, beyond the shadow-life, the warp and woof of time's shadow-work. That sense of our first step, the recovery of our true voice- without the false words, the beclouded glance. Instead, we live as strangers, to ourselves and to one another. And you ask me where I'm from. Originally? 

~