And I am forty-nine and getting old and soon it will be too late for all the things I know nothing of but which torment me in the middle of the night and here now in this place which is supposed to be a comfort and a solace. I am lonely and hungry and I have never breathed a word of this to anyone. Nobody knows or cares. I don't want anyone to know or care.

The day is refracted, and the next and the one after that, all of them broken up into a hundred juggled segments, each brilliant and self-contained so that the hours are no longer linear but assorted like bright sweets in a jar.

He sees that time is what we live in, but that it is also what we carry within us. Time is then, but it is also our own perpetual now.

To be completely ignorant of the collective past seems to me to be another state of amnesia; you would be untethered, adrift in time. Which is why all societies have sought some kind of memory bank, whether by way of folklore, story-telling, recitation of the ancestors--from Homer to Genesis. And why the heritage industry does so well today; most people may not be particularly interested in the narrative of the past, in the detail or the discussion, but they are glad to know that it is there.