Everything we do and don’t do makes a wake, a legion of waves and troughs that pound the shores at the edges of what we mean, grinding away on the periphery of what we know. They go on, after the years in which we lived our individual lives are long passed. If we don’t learn that simple, devastating, and redeeming detail of being alive—that what we do, all the jangle of our declarations and defeats, lasts longer than we ourselves do, that the past isn’t over—then the parade of our days stands to indict much more than it bequeaths. This is something that we have to learn now. Many of us count
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