[Image: opening narration/subtitle from the 1999-2000 anime series Ima, Soko ni Iru Boku (Now and Then, Here and There), critically and commercially very successful — but also but very dark . One site which I consulted about the series highly recommended watching it, but added that you won’t want to watch it a second time.]
From whiskey river:
The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color. Often at night there is lightning, but it quivers all alone. There is no thunder, no relieving rain. These are strange and breathless days, the dog days, when people are led to do things they are sure to be sorry for after.
(Natalie Babbitt [source])
…and (italicized lines):
Night and the River
I have seen the great feet
leaping
into the riverand I have seen moonlight
milky
along the long muzzleand I have seen the body
of something
scaled and wonderfulslumped in the sudden fire of its mouth,
and I could not tell
which fit memore comfortably, the power,
or the powerlessness;
neither would have meentirely; I was divided,
consumed,
by sympathy,pity, admiration.
After a while
it was done,the fish had vanished, the bear
lumped away
to the green shoreand into the trees. And then there was only
this story.
It followed me homeand entered my house—
a difficult guest
with a single tunewhich it hums all day and through the night—
slowly or briskly,
it doesn’t matter,it sounds like a river leaping and falling;
it sounds like a body
falling apart.
(Mary Oliver [source])
…and:
One of the saddest realities is most people never know when their lives have reached the summit. Only after it is over and we have some kind of perspective do we realize how good we had it a day, a month, five years ago. The walk together in the December snow, the phone call that changed everything, and that lovely evening in the bar by the Aegean. Back then you thought “this is so nice.” Only later did you realize it was the rarest bliss.
(Jonathan Carroll [unknown source, but quoted all over])