Upon the horizon

How much I would give for permanence, certainty and some absolutes. I live in the woeful in-betweens of expectation and aspiration, always striving and reaching, living with effort and on the strength of self-belief. As much as I have been forgotten I have forgotten myself. I cannot locate myself even in this place with a history so immense and a culture so amorphous, and home—home is a conclusion built upon premises I have not yet constructed, a destination clouded by the distance of ambition. In time to come I may not recognise it, nor may it welcome me any longer, and then we would pass each other by. Because home may be an island, but it is also shaped by the tide.  

Hidden lives

Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Middlemarch

George Eliot

Free space

In the moments between the moments that we remember, when our eyes are cast to the sky and not set to purpose, we find a little of that peace and free will that was promised to us but that we often forget we have. The drawings scrawled across the clouds with our fingertips we leave dangling in the air, and seek instead letters stricken in stone, ground with steel and fire into the permanency of memories not our own. The free will we leave behind. In the moments of indecision, the brackets of blue sky between buildings, in the distance from thought to thought. Before the point of the spear, the quivering of its shaft, the arch of the arm or the release of strength: in the sterile stillness of free space where the violence of purpose is born.