Looking back, I relegate that event to 'a time long ago' when it cannot in fact have been more than three or four years past. Time, "the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly host," has often charted me an imperfect map, confusing the cold science of duration with the temporal landscape of life. I rue our measurement of duration, which allows no rhythm, no true living, and boxes one in by the hours, minutes, seconds and milliseconds (by it's misled implementation–for how can our measurment of time be inherently bad?...but then again, must it be that the tool always maintains innocence and our minds are the source of all tainted intentions and misuse? After all, one wonders wherefrom sprang the tool? No, I do not allow tools to maintain total innocence: timekeeping is guilty too!). Fie that there is no room for the wanderlust and wayward life in this regimental chronology which marks our procession through the years, no room until the very last tear of the dewdrop evaporates under the sun. "Repent harlequin" and so forth...

Then it was an era ago, past many long streaking memories when I opened, during spring or summer when the light was stretching but the solstice was still far off like a misty island enshrouded on the horizon, A la Recherce du Temps Perdu: Du Côté de Chez Swann–or the English translation anyways, Remembrance of Things Past: Swann's Way–and I read very little of it but what I did was like ecstasy. It was a strange–and strangely cheap, I recall–edition, that and the other strange things perhaps not being unusual amongst the bountiful yet worryingly scarce number of works unshackled by copyright and therefore open to haphazard publishing experimentation, and what was strange, beside the price and the cover being a photograph of a Frenchman (Proust, one imagines but from the mien imparted by said photo, hopes otherwise) with the more traditional cover not obliterated as one might imagine but instead appearing as a black and white scan at the beginning of the book, was that it was rather short (only 218 pages long): that slimness concerned my first impression, as I had hearsay that is was a rather lengthy volume, but lo!–on opening the thing the explanation unfolded; the book was printed in only nine or ten point font with margins which, while not painful-to-sensibilities starving, were certainly inclined ascetically. That first meeting was December–now goodbye odd book, to bookshelf!­ There it languished more or less until...perhaps it was actually late winter, early spring. If only I had a calendar for these things!

So I read very little, perhaps a page and a half–which I reckon would fill three pages in another edition–and every sentence sweeps me away. The words light my mind on fire and it is like nothing else. After a page and a half I am exhausted, and lay down to stew on myriad things further. Now today, a gulf of memories separating me from that time, again I opened the book and...

Very little, much less. I read and understood and was not exhausted. I read it but engaged in little dialogue–dialogue only insofar as necessary for acceptable comprehension. But that is not where the dreams live, where the passions thunder! A multitude of thoughts like a sea, constantly overwhelming and beckoning, I want a return to those days. Perhaps they were only so numbered because they were shallow, or perhaps the last remains of the glint have finally left my eye. Arapaho would receive multiple names throughout their lives, and those names would carry immense power: perhaps our fixation on people keeping their names is misleading; can I truly be said to be that person who opened Swann's Way all those years ago? I am, or that person is a stranger whose actions I am merely privy to, like a soul's recollection of a past life or a fading world of dreams upon awakening. As thrown out not long ago, that with every step we die and are reborn...well, it's a little dramatic.

Speaking of time, these are thirty second, one minute and somewhere between one and two minute poses. It's easier on the conscious to make a mess in short order then to labor over it day after day, you know.

Recently the days have been lacking, despite November promises that December would see a rise in drawing...promises are loans on the future and it appears I am in debt.

Now, matters of rust are closed for today and one exhales in relief.