If I die tonight, and I don’t see why I should, I shall have been sorry to have missed the finish, but I shall still count myself very lucky to have seen so much... What a period! What an age to have been alive in! Oh, thank God I was born when I was.
-Margery Allingham, The Oaken Heart, 307-308
You work your way down, or not so much down as within, into the interior of the present, until finally you come to that beginning in which all things, the world and the light itself, at a word welled up into being out of their absence. And nothing is here that we are beyond the reach of merely because we do not know about it. It is always the first morning of Creation and always the last day, always the now that is in time and the Now that is not, that has filled time with reminders of Itself.
-Wendell Berry, Fidelity, 4-5.
