I am packing my belongings in the shawl my mother used to wear when she went to the market. And I am going from my valley. But thi...s time I shall never return. I am leaving behind me my 50 years of memory--memory. Strange that the mind will forget so much of what only this moment has passed and yet hold clear and bright the memory of what happened years ago of men and women long since dead. Yet who shall say what is real and what is not. Can I believe this all gone when their voices are still a glory in my ears. No. And I will stand to say no and no again, for they remain within my mind. There is no fence nor hedge around time that is gone. You can go back and have what you like of it, if you can remember. So I can go close my eyes on my valley as it is today and it is gone. And I see it as it was when I was a boy--green it was and possessed of the plenty of the earth. In all Wales there was none so beautiful.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the marriage ceremony, that moment when falling in love is replaced by the arduous drama of staying in love, the words "for ric...her, for poorer, in sickness and in health,' til death us do part" set love in the temporal context in which it achieves its meaning. As time begins to elapse, one begins to love the other because they have shared the same experience, the same moments of duration. Selves may not intertwine but lives do, and shared memory becomes as much of a bond as the bond of the flesh. One might say shared memory is not love itself but a consequence of being in love; but in what people commonly say about long-lasting love, it is the attitudes toward time implied in such words such as constancy and fidelity that recur.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Here lies a man who was killed by lightning; He died when his prospects seemed to be brightening.... He might have cut a flash in this world of trouble, But the flash cut him, and he lies in the stubble.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »