Fever and Spear II

"It simply isn't that easy, it isn't that easy to erase everything and to erase yourself and for not a trace to remain, not even the last rim or the last remnant of a rim, it's not easy simply to 'be' like the bloodstain that can be washed and scrubbed and suppressed and then ... then one begin to doubt that it ever existed. And each vestige always drags behind it the shadow of a story, perhaps not complete, doubtless incomplete, full of lacunae, ghostly, hieroglyphic, cadaverous or fragmentary, like bits of gravestone or like ruined pediments with fractured inscriptions, and sometimes it's not even possible to know how a story really ended... But the form is one thing and quite another the actual ending, which is always known: just as time is one thing and its content another, never repeated, infinitely variable, while time itself is homogeneous, unalterable. And it is that known ending which allows us to dub everyone ingenious and futile, the clever and the stupid, the totally committed as well as the slippery and the evasive, the unwary, the cautious and those who hatched plots and set traps, the victims and the executioners and the fugitives, the innocuous and the malicious, from the position of false superiority - time will see it off, it will be time, time that will cure it - of those who have not yet reached their end and are still groping their way uncertainly forwards or walking lightly with shield and spear, or slowly and wearily with shield all battered and spear blunt and dull, without even realising that we will soon be with them, with those who have been expelled and those who have passed and then ... then even our sharpest, most sympathetic judgements will be dubbed futile and ingenuous, why did she do that, they will say of you, why so much fuss and why the quickening pulse, why the trembling, why the somersaulting heart; and of me they will say: why did he take those particular steps and why so many? And of us both they will say: why all that conflict and struggle, why did they fight instead of just looking and staying still, why were they unable to meet or to go on seeing each other, and why so much sleep, so many dreams, and why that scratch, my fever, my word, your pain, and all those doubts, all that torment?"

Javier Marias 'Your Face Tomorrow'

8:22 p.m. - 2012-03-07