The Counsel Of The Dead Is Not

We Have Inhabited Both The Actual And The Imaginary Realms For A Long Time. But We Don't Live In Either Place The Way Our Parents Or Ancestors Did. Enchantment Alters With Age, And With The Age. We Know A Dozen Arthurs Now, All Of Them True. The Shire Changed Irrevocably Even In Bilbo's Lifetime. Don Quixote Went Riding Out To Argentina And Met Jorge Luis Borges There. Plus C'est La Même Chose, Plus ça Change.

Everything Gives Way Before The Recurring Torment And Festivity Of Passion.

Truth Is A Matter Of The Imagination. The Soundest Fact May Fail Or Prevail In The Style Of Its Telling: Like That Singular Organic Jewel Of Our Seas, Which Grows Brighter As One Woman Wears It And, Worn By Another, Dulls And Goes To Dust.

To Have A Choice At All Is To Be Privileged.

Now They Came Back To Him, On This Night He Was Seventeen Years Old. All The Years And Places Of His Brief Broken Life Came Within Mind's Reach And Made A Whole Again. He Knew Once More, At Last, After This Long, Bitter, Waisted Time, Who He Was And Where He Was. But Where He Must Go In The Years To Come, That He Could Not See; And He Feared To See It.