We All Have Appointments With The Past.

The More Images I Gathered From The Past, I Said, The More Unlikely It Seemed To Me That The Past Had Actually Happened In This Or That Way, For Nothing About It Could Be Called Normal: Most Of It Was Absurd, And If Not Absurd, Then Appalling.

It Is Thanks To My Evening Reading Alone That I Am Still More Or Less Sane.

I Wonder Now Whether Inner Coldness And Desolation May Not Be The Pre-condition For Making The World Believe, By A Kind Of Fraudulent Showmanship, That One's Own Wretched Heart Is Still Aglow.

Like Our Bodies And Like Our Desires, The Machines We Have Devised Are Possessed Of A Heart Which Is Slowly Reduced To Embers.

And So They Are Ever Returning To Us, The Dead. At Times They Come Back From The Ice More Than Seven Decades Later And Are Found At The Edge Of The Moraine, A Few Polished Bones And A Pair Of Hobnailed Boots.