Why is it that these pithy introductions always end up disparaging the painfully direct writings that follow the bar? I don't know if I mean to distance myself from things that I fear are more true of me than I'd like to admit. Anyhow, no exceptions here. But I'll save the rejection of the writing, because I think it does that quite by itself.

---

Those fools gathered by the beaches, they'll stop you and tell you they know pain. Stuff all that; sit down by me, brother, and I'll let you know exactly what it's all about.

The continuity of experience and emotion can be devastating. I always look to art to give me some answers, but as much as I believe in its transcendence, sometimes it cannot escape its temporality. Oftentimes when I need it the most, such as now. Alas, the full force of its reality simply cannot come into its own.

So it goes once more this time. Memories, moments, laments, and lines, they all haunt me from years and years ago. It is never enough to simply best them once, because they seem all too eager to return as often as you like. One clearly needs to get to the root of the problem, but I don't quite see how to do that in this case. Without blowing up an entire universe, that is: it would take some nous for it to be otherwise!

There is little worse than making the right choice, but regretting it anyway. I won't pretend that I haven't felt like it might have been wrong at times, but as I sit here and try to keep from laughing at the ridiculousness of it all, it seems pretty clear to me what the right of the matter is. I'd love to tell the players involved of all the hurt I've felt over the years, but I made another choice too, and that one, I am afraid, was wrong. Perhaps, if I had spoken earlier, without worrying where it would have led, things might have been different.

The most harrowing of all lines from Cloudstreet are Fish's words to Rose, talking of being in that wide vibrating space, beyond all time, where lies all that is and will be. I sense this sort of detachment in myself, but don't know what exactly it means. Why does everything feel so passive? I am truly starting to feel older, and it deeply troubles me that I seem to exist in a different plane, outside of all time, like Fish. I picture all around me moving on to whatever it is lies ahead in their lives, and I sit here, the pathetic figure who looks only to past glories and those brief moments where there was the possibility of escaping this all. It all seems to be gone now. I sit alone with these memories, and the people in them forget as they live their lives. Why can't I do anything about this...

I look upon these darling moments, and think it such a shame that they should all be to waste. Would that things could be different. Yet this world of ours cannot revolve around a will, no matter how earnest the person behind it, nor the tears he may shed wishing it otherwise. I hope you do not take that for bitterness, because I would like to think it is my only display of wisdom in the entire matter.