May 25
In a thousand years, who will still speak of glory and disgrace? Only one thing troubles me in the end: that while I lived I did not drink enough of the wine of the moment.
Elegies for Myself (freely rendered)
Listening mode
In a thousand years, who will still speak of glory and disgrace? Only one thing troubles me in the end: that while I lived I did not drink enough of the wine of the moment.
In the middle of a good evening, you may find you are already telling it. You are still sitting at the table, and inside you the sentence is already forming with which you will describe it tomorrow. Part of you has gone on ahead to see how the whole thing looks from outside.
This inner reporter doesn't need a large audience. A few friends are enough for him, a message, sometimes just your own memory, which is meant to put what happened in order later. On a small scale he asks the same question by which reputation and embarrassment are otherwise decided: How will it have been?
You can't get rid of him entirely, and perhaps you don't want to. Telling is a way of letting others share in something. Some things only truly belong to you once you have passed them on.
It gets difficult where the telling is quicker than the experience. Then you have kept an evening in a form that tells well, and no longer quite know what it was like when someone beside you laughed and you didn't yet know why.
