I've Always Been Fascinated By The Operation

Getting To Know Someone Else Involves Curiosity About Where They Have Come From, Who They Are.

We Open Our Mouths And Out Flow Words Whose Ancestries We Do Not Even Know. We Are Walking Lexicons. In A Single Sentence Of Idle Chatter We Preserve Latin, Anglo-saxon, Norse: We Carry A Museum Inside Our Heads, Each Day We Commemorate Peoples Of Whom We Have Never Heard.

Perhaps I Shall Not Write My Account Of The Paleolithic At All, But Make A Film Of It. A Silent Film At That, In Which I Shall Show You First The Great Slumbering Rocks Of The Cambrian Period, And Move From Those To The Mountains Of Wales...from Ordovician To Devonian, On The Lush Glowing Cotswolds, On To The White Cliffs Of Dover... An Impressionistic, Dreaming Film, In Which The Folded Rocks Arise And Flower And Grow And Become Salisbury Cathedral And York Minster.

And In Another Year Everything Will Be Different Yet Again. It Is Always Like That, And Always Will Be; You Are Forever Standing On The Brink, In A Place Where You Cannot See Ahead; There Is Nothing Of Which To Be Certain Except What Lies Behind. This Should Be Terrifying, But Somehow It Is Not.

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.