[Image of Fay Ray, by William Wegman (1988), found here, as well as elsewhere
on the Web (e.g., Style Me to the Moon)]
From whiskey river:
My Hand
See how the past is not finished
here in the present
it is awake the whole time
never waiting
it is my hand now but not what I held
it is not my hand but what I held
it is what I remember
but it never seems quite the same
no one else remembers it
a house long gone into air
the flutter of tires over a brick road
cool light in a vanished bedroom
the flash of the oriole
between one life and another
the river a child watched
(W. S. Merwin, The Shadow of Sirius)
…and:
And now here’s the thing. It takes a time like this for you to find out how sore your heart has been, and, moreover, all the while you thought you were going around idle terribly hard work was taking place. Hard, hard work, excavation and digging, mining, moiling through tunnels, heaving, pushing, moving rock, working, working, working, working, panting, hauling, hoisting. And none of this work is seen from the outside. It’s internally done. It happens because you are powerless and unable to get anywhere, to obtain justice or have requital, and therefore in yourself you labor, you wage and combat, settle scores, remember insults, fight, reply, deny, blab, denounce, triumph, outwit, overcome, vindicate, cry, persist, absolve, die and rise again. All by yourself? Where is everybody? Inside your breast and skin, the entire cast.
(Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March [source])
My review of this book is now up 
When my siblings and I were kids, at some point Mom and Dad bought us a huge collection of LPs of music of all sorts — a passive music-appreciation course, of sorts, for kids in a small town. The entire set arrived in a cardboard box which none of us (but Dad) could lift. Each album was enclosed in its own slim box, with its own little brochure full of lyrics and other notes. (One album came with an additional surprise: the one about orchestral music included a small, slender conductor’s wand.)
[Setting: a small automobile in a mid-sized city in northern Florida, USA. It is early morning. She is driving today; He occupies the passenger seat. The car pulls up to a curb. He opens his door and prepares to exit; in the midst of the usual love-yous, good-byes, and have-a-good-days, He suddenly remembers a specific item about which He meant to wish Her well.]
