Written on the Dark

by Guy Gavriel Kay

Looking back we can sometimes see this, but can rarely look ahead with any clarity at all. As to the future, we have guesses, hopes, plans, apprehensions. Or perhaps, for some, there is no time for any of these, caught up as they are in the hard, endlessly demanding task of living, of staying alive. — Yes. I truly didn’t know. We so seldom know.

He ended up having a different sort of life, however. Who can know where and when storms will crash upon us, or what slanting sunbeams, as at summer twilight, might illuminate our lives?

Originally, the poet confided to a few, it had been Célia captured and Pons saving her, but in the middle of a restless, windy night on her estate the thought came to her that she could write it differently, and she did. Because she could. It was her poem. No one had commissioned this work. No one had a right to any expectations of it. All they could do, really, was read it or not read it.

Envy has little to grasp hold of with some people, even if it tries.

But the words one chose were a way of seeing, of understanding the world. And the sound of them mattered. It did!

What takes place, what does not: so many forks and branches along the twisting roads

of time, so many wheels of fate turning, turning, lifting and lowering, one person, another, into light, into darkness.