When we mourn those who die young - those who have been robbed of time - we weep for lost joys.  We weep for opportunities and pleasures we ourselves have never known.  We feel sure that somehow that young body would have known the yearning delight for which we searched in vain all our lives.  We believe that the untried soul, trapped inside its young prison, might have flown free and known the joy we still seek.  We say that life is sweet, its satisfactions deep.  All this we say, as we sleepwalk through our time and through years of days and nights.  We let time cascade over us like a waterfall, believing it to be never ending.  Yet each day that touches us, and every man in the world, is unique; irredeemable; over.  And just another Monday.  Ah, but those lost Mondays of our young dead friend!  How much better they would have been!  Years pass. Decades pass.  And living has not been done…

Our sanity depends essentially on a narrowness of vision - the ability to select the elements vital to survival, while ignoring the great truths.  So the individual lives his daily life, without due attention to the fact that he has no guarantee of tomorrow.  He hides from himself the knowledge that his life is a unique experience, which will end in the grave; that at every second, lives as unique as his start and end.  This blindness allows a pattern of living to hand itself on, and few who challenge this pattern survive.

There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives.  Those who are lucky enough to find it ease like water over a stone, onto its fluid contours, and are home.  Some find it in the place of their birth; others may leave a seaside town, parched, and find themselves refreshed in the desert.  There are those born in rolling countryside who are really only at ease in the intense and busy loneliness of the city.  For some, the search is for the imprint of another; a child or a mother, a grandfather or a brother, a lover, a husband, a wife, or a foe.  We may go through our lives happy or unhappy, successful or unfulfilled, loved or unloved, without ever standing cold with the shock of recognition, without ever feeling the agony as the twisted iron in our soul unlocks itself and we slip at last into place.