July 19
If people lived on and on and never faded like the morning dew — how could anything still move us? It is precisely because nothing lasts that the world is so beautiful.
Essays in Idleness (freely rendered)
Listening mode
If people lived on and on and never faded like the morning dew — how could anything still move us? It is precisely because nothing lasts that the world is so beautiful.
Some things that move you, you want to keep at once. A sentence someone says in passing, a particular way of laughing, the mood of an evening when nobody looks at the clock. The wish arrives almost together with the feeling, as if the two belonged together.
What you can actually keep behaves differently, though. A voice message can be played as often as you like. Perhaps that is exactly why you rarely listen to it; after all, it's there. It gains weight only when no new one can come. But then not because it remains, but because what it came from has not remained.
So inside being moved there is a wish that would dissolve the feeling if it were granted. You want to hold on to what touches you only because it cannot be held. This is not an error in thinking that you could correct. Without that reaching, the evening might have meant nothing to you.
When you hear that laugh again, it is already over before it occurs to you that you wanted to remember it.
