Alex, in the epilogue

These posts are a testament to the haphazard intersections of one's mind. It's true to content, and true to form, and it's vaguely reminiscent of some of the themes running through Nino Ricci's The Origin of Species. The happenings of life, the utter chance of it all, the movement of memories, the mind's eye.

"He had stopped reading. It was miracle enough, maybe, the thingness of things, their funniness. That there were clouds, that there was air, that stones formed from the sand and then turned to sand again, on and on. What were these things, where had they come from, what could they mean? How could they fill the mind and yet be so small? There might be gods beyond them, and gods of gods, and, beyond these, things unimaginable, that the human mind could not name or give shape to and yet it could think they were there, it could marvel at the immensity of its own ignorance. Somehow through the chance of events, the slow building of things with No Plan, the mind had become fitted for such thoughts, for such moments of wonderment.

A shred of memory came to him, or perhaps something he'd dreamed, beckoning there at his mind's mid-horizon. He was in a northern country, walking or cycling, it wasn't clear which, and it was raning or had rained or the sun was out, and he was travelling, he was on a journey. He has been here before. For a moment the place took on such a vividness he thought he could hold it whole, could possess it: there were farms, clapboard houses, the outskirts of a town, a view accross woods to a lake. The smell of things, the clarity of them, even while they slipped from him and refused to take on their meaning. It was like living a thing and losing it in the same instant. Where were those houses, that lake? He has been here. It was like a place in the mind he returned to to find its meaning, only to find that the meaning of it was simply that it was there."

And so it goes, so it goes.