whirlwind

We become more susceptible to, more partial to, the abstract as we get older. This is not because of increased understanding or any onset of wisdom, nor is it the result of diminished intensity. It’s often just the opposite. The particular is too much for us, because it is leaving us.

Is that right? Or is it that the particular is too much for us, because there is too much of it? Who could guess that all the fires and despairs of youth, all those almost intolerable nows, would eventually pile up in a mass of time too obdurate and undifferentiated to be called memory? Or, worse, that some present-day gale of pain or need might cause that mass of losses—for that’s what, at this point, they are—to disperse and go swirling around you with a force that no form, much less a mind, could contain. It can be a relief to release one’s hold on singularity for the sake of a binding truth, even if the truth is only that there can be no such thing. If we can’t salvage the bits of memory and matter that have made us what we are, let us at least acknowledge the whirlwind.

Christian Wiman, "The Drift of the World"