February 10
The path leads through the Valley of Humiliation and the Slough of Despond. Whoever walks through them does not lose the way — he is the way.
The Pilgrim's Progress (freely rendered)
Listening mode
The path leads through the Valley of Humiliation and the Slough of Despond. Whoever walks through them does not lose the way — he is the way.
There are times when you have no good sentence for the question “So, what are you up to these days?” You answer evasively, change the subject or mention something that stopped being true a while ago. The weeks pass all the same, only they seem to belong nowhere. You treat them like an interruption, after which your real life is supposed to resume.
Later a sentence usually turns up. It had been a difficult phase; you had learned a lot from it. Maybe that is even true. But the sentence is smoother than the time it describes. It gives that time, after the fact, a direction it didn't have back then, and so makes it more bearable, but not necessarily more understandable.
What is harder is to let those months count as yours without ennobling them. In them you ate, slept, phoned someone, avoided a few things. They were no detour and no break from your life. You were there, just as you were at the time.
Sometimes someone asks you now what it was like back then. You notice that the ready-made sentence is already there, waiting.
