As a carryover from childhood camps, I still instinctively check my mailbox with excitement. At camp, when I felt homesick, the arrival of mail from family was a reminder that I was not forgotten, that somewhere in the great world, though not here, my existence was written boldly in another's ledger. Now, despite my Pavlovian reflex, browsing my mail is not merely unexciting but depressing. What am I in this world but a pawn of others' projects? The utility companies require the payments they are owed. The stores have new products they invite me to come and buy. A speaker has planned a lecture and seeks an audience. I owe taxes to the government for making money, for spending that money, for owning a home, for owning a car to leave that home. I am not a name but an account number, a social security number, a customer ID, a "current resident" of this address. Every day I am sought out by people who do not know me but who want something from me. I matter to the world merely as the owner of a bank account from which others wish to withdraw. Most annoying are subscription solicitations I receive from literary magazines that got my name from rejecting work I submitted. They do not want my writing, but might I send them my money—so I can read the writers they chose over me? They thwart my project and subsume me into theirs. Not that, on reflection, I can blame any of these solicitors. A store needs customers, a speaker needs listeners, a publisher needs subscribers. I use others as surely as others use me. They are not my enemies but individuals trying to live and succeed, just as I am. Nevertheless, all those individuals added together make up the world, and the world is cruel.

At every stage of life, we desire to be noticed and affirmed by others. Infants are born craving affection as much as milk. Children playing do not require the active involvement of nearby adults, but if you try to leave they demand that you watch them play. Adolescents, in their perpetual anxiety to be popular, do not so much look at others through their own eyes as look constantly at themselves through others' eyes. The dying worry about being remembered after death, though when dead how can they care if they're forgotten? As adults, our successes give us little pleasure unless sweetened by others' admiration. If we dress up, there must be others to see us or our work seems wasted—no one wears a tuxedo at home. A marvelous gardener once told me (speaking for human nature) that he takes more delight in a single garden visitor's compliment than in all the shrubs and flowers he has ever planted. What is this craving for another's eye to rest upon us?

On reflection, a desire for recognition seems irrational. Since we live in our own mind, why should we care what thoughts are in another's? Is this not like a Canadian fretting about the weather in Mexico? How to explain this need for notice is debatable. Are we so doubtful of our worth that others must attest to it? Conversely, are we so certain of our worth that others must bow down to it?

Growing up in a small town, my life had an audience. I knew everyone at church, at school, on opposing sports teams. Everyone else knew everyone too. Thus we were all each other's audience. This did not always make life pleasant; one had an audience for one's failures as well as one's successes. But it made life meaningful. Everything counted because someone was watching. In high school, the bliss of getting a pretty girlfriend consisted less in having the girl herself than in walking the halls with her on your arm, for others to see. The chief motivation to score goals in sports was not to beat the other team but to impress the fans. To score a goal or get a girl on a desert island would have been a paltry pleasure. Small town life resembled the medieval universe in which saints and angels looked down on the adventures of humankind. Your actions might lead to heaven or hell, but because all eyes were on you, even damnation possessed a coziness.

I see a decisive break in my life occurring when I left town after high school. My well-nurtured ego thought of the outside world as the waiting arena of my actions, where all humanity was expectantly assembled for me, yet when I arrived I found that no one knew my name nor wished to learn it; I was a king without any subjects. Arriving at college was like stepping out of the medieval world into the modern. The campus was a chaos of otherness with nothing at the center, least of all me. Unknown students from unknown places lived unknown lives, unconnected to mine. What did my actions matter anymore, since no one was keeping track of me but me? I studied anomie in my sociology classes and experienced it alone in my dorm room. Though I made friends, I no longer had an audience.

I remember lying awake in my dorm bed the first night I arrived on campus. The thought gripped me that no one on campus or in the city knew I had come or required that I be there in order to function. The local restaurants had been in business for twenty years without my patronage. The dorm where I slept had been housing students since before I was born. If I died tonight, the city would not miss me or pause from its busy routines except for someone to call my family to fetch my body. I felt frightened to be so unnecessary. The one comfort I clung to was that the college had admitted me and, more importantly, had offered me a scholarship, implying it wanted me. For what is the proof of being wanted except being paid?

I began noticing every small sign of my insignificance to others, and minor episodes made deep impressions. One day I was issued a $100 citation for parking seven feet from a fire hydrant, when the law required fifteen feet. I thought the ticket was unreasonable, for although common sense told me not to block a fire hydrant, how was I to know the precise distance required, when no one had posted a sign? I appealed the ticket using this argument but was informed in a formal letter that the law does not bend for the ignorant, and I had to pay. Reading the brief, austere sentences from an authoritative stranger gave me a view of myself through the law's eyes, as a nameless citizen. I had duties more than rights; the law's only concern was that the human herd keep inside the fences, excuses irrelevant.

Another time, having a problem with my television service, I called the cable company and waited on hold for thirty minutes for assistance, and vented my frustration when my call was finally answered. Hearing the polite but wearied apology of the employee, it occurred to me that for her I was just another angry customer adding to her bad day, that she wanted to solve my problem only so that I, who was her problem, would go away. At the time I was taking a seminar on existential philosophers, who advocate being a distinctive individual instead of one of the masses. Such advice appeared hollow, for each of us seems distinctive to ourselves, but to everyone else we are part of the crowd.

Society is adroit at disillusioning newcomers, and many self-assured children grow up to be bitter adults. But bitterness, instead of a form of disillusionment, is really the refusal to give up your childhood illusions of importance. Ignored instead of welcomed by the world, you fault the world as blind and evil in order not to fault yourself as naïve. Bitterness is a child's coddling narcissism within the context of an adult's harsh life. Instead, I knew that the world only trampled me as a street crowd does an earthworm—not out of malice or stupidity, but because no one sees it. Thus my pain was not to feel wrongly slighted, but to feel rightly slighted.

A newspaper article I read about an unemployed man crystallized my sense of society's accidental cruelty toward individuals. There is often a catch-22 of poverty. One needs money to get on one's feet, but one must get on one's feet to make money. Having lost his job, the man could not pay numerous parking tickets and so was finally thrown in jail overnight, causing him to miss a job interview the next morning that would have enabled him to pay parking tickets. I groaned in pity for his snowballing hardships, yet who could be blamed? The employer who did not hire him, when the candidate did not show up? The police officer who jailed him, when social order requires laws, however unfair their particular application? Because we are no single person's or institution's responsibility, we may suffer an unjust fate, although no one has acted unjustly.

Though far less egregiously than the poor, everyone suffers somewhat from peer neglect. Social life is a fierce battle to be heard, in which each person is a tone of sound contributing to the white noise of society. The first requirement of any success is getting others' attention amid the clamor. Therefore smart companies do not so much invest in great products as in great marketing of them, plastering their ads on billboards, magazines, bus stops, trash cans, grocery receipts, anything plasterable—pouring their money into persuading us to give them ours. City-dwelling individuals, like low-budget companies, staple bulletins to telephone poles to advertise their talents and ideas, unashamed to brag since modesty is a liability to success. But since everyone wants to be noticed, there is no one available to do the noticing. How many pedestrians, all hurrying on their own errands, pause to read those bulletins? Only a few, perhaps, as they hastily staple their own bulletin on top. Stores open their doors daily for business, but since most people are also working, there is only a trickle of customers. At town meetings, people only come to share some burning comment, and so, planning their wording while they wait and weighing their words' effectiveness once done, no one listens to anyone else's comment. At conferences and orientations, each newcomer walks in the room and worries what others are thinking of him—a needless anxiety since the others are too worried about themselves to notice his entrance.

In our universal mutual oblivion of each other, fame is a fool's pursuit—but there are many fools. Point a television camera at any sport spectator, and he will gasp and grin and furiously wave, delighted to have his image transmitted to so many retinas. Yet since no one heeds a stranger's face on television, it being a common sight, only his friends who are watching notice him—the very people whose notice does not make him famous. True, a few people achieve real stardom, yet look closer and you will see, each celebrity is his own greatest fan. The crowds clamoring for autographs have not followed the actress's career so closely as she has. Who else has attended every premiere, heard every interview, sat in court through every divorce? Biographers devote whole books to rock stars, but a rock star devotes his whole life to himself. Nor is that rock star so essential to the worshiping world as he believes. Though he struts the stage like a human god, he is in fact a beggar to his fans. Without them, he would have no one to perform to, whereas, without him, they would simply go to other concerts. Wandering in the library, I will sometimes stop by a classic book like Crime and Punishment. Would the shelves be any less crammed, or readers any less busy, if Dostoevsky had not written it? The riches of literature are infinite, and the infinite minus the finite would still be infinite. But always my last thought is, if the great and famous are nothing, what am I?

Some days I feel so insubstantial that I am startled by signs of my visible presence in the world. On a recent afternoon walk, when my thoughts on these matters had gone somewhat too far, a dog rooting in the grass turned its head and barked at me. I turned my head toward the sound in surprise: I had made the rooting dog look up—therefore I did exist. True, the dog hated me, but in its bark I heard a vicious compliment, for it is better to be hated than ignored, hate being a form of acknowledgement, albeit negative.

I can interpret parts of my life as an effort to be a causer of change. I suppose I write to impact others' minds, not for their sake but because, if things give when I push, I will know I have a solid body. Certainly no writer chiefly writes for the love of truth or beauty; we read perhaps for the love of truth or beauty. Writing produces the entirely different pleasure of self-assertion—a pleasure less noble but more intense. What can reading another's fine sentence compare to crafting your own? Writers fatten their self-sense upon their writings. Thanks to them, an order of words exists which was not previously in the world. How could they then be nobody?

Yet the world is a very big ball to budge using only words. Before I started writing, with the faith of a beginner, I vaguely supposed that I would not only succeed but succeed precisely where others had failed, that the problems that had stumped past thinkers were only unsolved because I had not yet worked on them, and I would find the way forward for lost modernity. My future words glimmered as things always do which are not seen but foreseen, and I imagined the distant day when the public would receive my pages, my mind given body. Instead, my first publication punctured my dreaming ego like a pin. The magazine arrived in the mail, I thumbed the pages, I read my name in print, I looked around the silent room. Outside my window cars drove by, unaware of my accomplishment. I reflected that even much greater successes than my small one must always be local and limited, since most of humanity remains ignorant of them. For example, who besides some colleagues can name last year's Nobel Prize winner in economics?

Anyway, art is long, and my patience is short. I make my head hurt trying to catch subtleties of thought and feeling, and a week's labors yield a few paltry paragraphs. In magazines, I see critics scribbling book reviews every month, highlighting the errors and toppling the hopes of some new author, and I reflect on the wisdom of critics. To destroy is vastly easier than to create, yet it affects the world as powerfully. An author's years of labor lift him tentatively toward respect; a critic's hour of faultfinding sinks him back into scorn, which soon reverts to oblivion.

Destruction is a surrogate for creation—self-assertion for the uncreative. Normally, instead of squashing bugs I find in my house, I transfer them outside in respect of life. My example and inspiration are the Jains of India, who stare at the ground to avoid trampling and wear masks to avoid swallowing any brother in being. Yet I have killed, and not solely for convenience, the door being too far away, or because I find a fellow creature loathsome, like the roach. There is a fascinating feeling of power in destruction. A beetle that just now lived and moved, its matrix of tiny organs and muscles and nerves unutterably complex, is now a smudge of yellow slime, and I have done it. God planned the beetle before the world and in the fullness of time knit its body in its mother's egg, but with a tap of my foot I have stained the ground with guts and thwarted providence.

Alas, such episodes of petty Satanism are a poor consolation. We do not want to stamp on the world's throat to get its attention, but to be freely received. We want to be wanted and welcomed, not for our money or as a means to any end, nor even for any traits or characteristics, but for our rock bottom being, that irreducible essence of us which is best outwardly symbolized by our having a particular name. I give thanks for a wife, family, and friends, a few beings among the world's six billion, who know my name. While a child's and parent's bond is intrinsic, based on blood, a wife's and husband's is extrinsic, built on time. When I first met my wife, we fell in love not so much with each other but with whatever qualities we liked about each other, and if we had woken before our wedding day to find each other altered, we might have split. But five years later, already those traits we fell in love with have become predicates attached to the subject hidden within, and we love the traits because they belong to the subject, rather than the subject because of the traits. Thus in old age, when a man and woman are ugly and senile and bear no resemblance to the boy and girl who got married, they care for each other not less tenderly but more, because time has tied them with a bond that is stronger than blood.

Besides in my marriage, I find affirmation in my church (the Episcopal). Let others write of the hypocrisy of churches, in the fashion of modernity. I walk through the great wood doors and gladly leave the world of market relations behind. I am welcomed, not as the first step toward trying to get something from me, but simply because here it is the order of things to welcome, as outside it is the order of things to try to get. Unlike the pocket-picking by corporations, the passing of church offering plates and sign-up sheets does not seem base since they are passed among peers for the good of the group. At its best, church community can be more heartening than a family. Whereas a family affirms you because of your special tie with them, at church you can shake hands and exchange peace with total strangers, because universal welcome is written into the canons and statutes like a law of nature. Thus whereas family is a haven from a hostile world, church is a vision of a better world.

Nevertheless, I am no monk or homebody, I cannot be content to live in retreat. I must make peace with the world or have no peace. Nor should this be difficult. I can easily accept the insignificance of others without doubting their right to exist. A toothless woman takes my change at a gas station. At the beach, a dandy loafs on his father's yacht. They are not destined for history books, but this does not invalidate them, for the rich and various world, to be complete, needs toothless clerks and loafing dandies as much as statesmen and celebrities. Yet, regarding myself, I seem to think I should be Caesar and, not being, I reproach myself for taking up six feet of space, ricocheting from absurd hope to absurd despair. This shows how self-love can not only make us too easy on ourselves, but also too hard, for we cannot accept in ourselves the inevitable limitations which, in others, seem natural and uncatastrophic.

There must be a Copernican revolution of the self. Instead of pointlessly cursing the sun to go around me, my chance of contentment is learning to orbit, being the world's audience instead of demanding the world be mine. If the world is a stage, then everyone's an extra, acting minor roles in simultaneous scenes in which no one has the lead. With so much happening, society is poorly made to satisfy pride, but well-made to satisfy interest, if we will let go of vanity and join the swirl of activity.

Thus reason tries to teach me, but experience must show me. For several years I have traded stocks, and some days trading converts me into commending the cutthroat world. On a typical morning, after a jog and breakfast, I turn on my computer to check the markets and consider if I will make any trades that day. At precisely 9:30, the silent symbols and numbers covering my screen begin to flicker furiously. Stock quotes flash green or red, bid prices and ask prices feint and jockey against each other, volume of shares traded jumps upward by thousands. As I watch this sudden electronic burst of life, I think of all the anonymous traders whom the flickering numbers represent, each trying to outsmart and defeat the others from the hidden command center of his or her desk, each of us believing we can succeed though the odds say some must lose. Pausing from my contest with other traders, I browse the internet for news, and almost every headline tells of some similar contest between feuding parties: politicians campaigning for limited votes, athletes negotiating with team owners for more lucrative contracts, litigants suing over someone's supposed error, startup companies stealing market share from established rivals. Meanwhile, through my open window come the shouts of nearby middle school children at recess, screaming and battling to be the best at soccer or kickball, while, inside the classrooms, they train and study to decide who in fifteen years will work for whom. How many aspirers there are, for how few prizes! Yet on the days I speak of, when my soul is sturdy, this universal strife and rivalry does not offend me; on the contrary, I pause to praise it. Is there not something sublime in competition? I admire the free market somewhat as I admire the world of the Iliad, not for any moral virtues, but for the strength and fierce ambition of the participants, what might be called their masculine virtues. Like the heroism of Greeks and Trojans who go into battle although most likely they will die, all people seem heroic as they strive to succeed in a vast society, though out of five hundred children, four hundred ninety nine will grow up to be less than they dreamed.

On such days, I acquiesce in being nothing, yet this acquiescence involves no passivity. If everyone is battling for a foothold in life, then my proper business is to battle too, and neither to be vain nor self-disparaging about the outcome. I make my peace with the world by embracing war.

1. SPACE
For a year I lived in Southern California, in a suburb of Los Angeles. Like all cities of its size, Los Angeles suggests the idea of bustling life. In every populous city there is an exuberance of energy and activity: a constant clamor, a continual rushing about, a customary sense of urgency that leaves the small town visitor feeling dazed and overwhelmed, but which the city dweller breathes as his air and element.

In Los Angeles, the freeway is the symbol of incessant motion, and so the symbol of life. Ships come to port in harbors; airplanes, after long flights, park at gates; trains stop at stations. But on the freeway there are neither stoplights, yield signs, nor crosswalks at which to pause, only furious and never-ceasing movement. The freeway, in its very conception, is so disdainful of stasis that it will only let enter its flow those already in motion: thus it does not offer turning lanes or intersections, only entrance ramps on which the aspiring driver must build enough speed to become worthy of its lanes. The freeway is a call to the open road; and in Los Angeles, where every hour is rush hour, it offers the chance to join a million others, whose common bond is a need to go. The only time traffic stops on the L.A. freeways is when there is too much of it. Los Angeles is known for having the worst congestion and the longest commutes in the country. Yet even this is a testament to the unrelenting life and energy of this city, that only its own excess of motion can bring that motion to a standstill.

Many a Saturday during that year of our residence, my wife and I would load our car and take to the freeways, whose sprawling network placed a few hundred cities, the vast Mojave Desert, several mountain ranges, and the mighty Pacific all in an hour's reach. We traveled throughout the area, seeing as much as we could, though only a fraction of what was there: downtown skylines and entertainment districts; train stations and ship harbors; farmers' markets and world bazaars; public parks and botanic gardens; mountaintop villages and lakeside resorts; commonplace lodgings and luxury estates; towns in the desert and cities by the sea. There was almost no place we visited for which I did not conceive at least some small desire to move there. It was never as though I judged that this new setting would suit me better but simply that everywhere I went I saw life, and life attracted me. Driving through the streets of an unfamiliar city, with cars zipping by and taxis taking people places; residents out walking their dogs, merchants setting out their wares, and businessmen hurrying down the sidewalks; couples sitting on verandas, friends chatting in cafes, and surfers heading for the beach; people working in their yards, or on the roads, or on their romances, with the sun going round overhead—all in a place I had never been before—I would think to myself: how is it that life has been going on here all this while, and I not a part of it? Can it be that I shall live only in my own little corner of the world, far from here, and not walk daily down these streets or at evenings retire to those fine homes on the hillside? Know merely my own neighbors, and not learn the names of these people and listen to their stories? Life was happening in that place, and it seemed a shame that I should miss out on it. Though an actual move would have been impossible, I could not help daydreaming about it, not merely playfully but with real hope, for our imagination runs ahead of our reason.

But the drive home on the freeways was invariably enough to curtail my thoughts of moving. On the freeways, which cut their way through an unending progression of cities, my attention was turned from the single place where I had been, to the innumerable places where I might go. In the first city I had seen the streets pulsing with life, but back on the freeways I saw the whole region pulsing with cities, each as rich as the one I had just left. What good would it do to move, when there would still be a thousand places where I was not? It was not life in one or another town that drew me, but life itself, in whatever town. How could I be content then to settle in any town? If my visit to a new place had revealed to me a new life, the drive home revealed a glimpse of far more life than could be joined, thereby stifling hopes, for even imagination cannot picture living everywhere.

I remember once flying into Los Angeles from the East Coast at night. During the day, one sees only the physical features of the land; at night, one sees only the lights of civilization. Flying high above, the sight of cities gives an impression of the human struggle for survival against the harsh inhospitality of nature. We do not space ourselves evenly across the land, but huddle together in little clusters. From the sky our city lights look like the campfires we gather around for safety and warmth, against the cold and dark of nature's night.

The lights of towns and cities were sparse for much of that cross-country trip, as we flew above the Midwest, over the Rocky Mountains, down through northern Arizona, and across the border into the California desert, almost pitch black below. All of a sudden, as we came over the crest of the San Bernardino Mountains, I saw spread out below a breathtaking panoply of urban lights, vast and brilliant, stretching some eighty miles to the Pacific Coast—the Greater Los Angeles metropolis. What a difference from those rickety outposts scattered across the Plains! Here was no mere embattled tribe clinging hard to existence, but a great and glorious empire. Here was a city awake while nature slept, burning its billion candles through the night, as if impatient of the dark. So vast and tremendous a sight filled me with a vague longing to experience in full the richness laid out before me. I wanted to grasp it with my whole being. But what could I do through that narrow airplane window but look with hungry eyes? Never before had all Los Angeles been contained in my field of vision, but the price of seeing so much of it at once was to see it from afar. From the ground it had been too large to take hold of in full; from the sky it was too distant. A city of such size is like a vast and intricate painting: if we step close to examine its details, we lose our view of the whole; if we step back to consider the whole, we cannot make out the details. Our powers of experience are not great enough for so great an object.

It was not only my encounters with the city that impressed me with a sense of life's immensity, but even more my adventures beyond the city. The state of California seemed an infinite gallery displaying the works of civilization as well as the wonders of nature. For all the glories of the former, it is invariably the latter that take first of show. Nature builds bigger and more beautifully than mortal architects. In the city I had seen great monuments, carved by human hands; but beyond the city, I saw where the hand of nature, with violent force, was carving the very continent and raising up new mountains from the sea. In downtowns, I had looked admiringly upon towering skyscrapers, but how could any city skyline rival the spires of the Sierra? The sheer diversity of nature was dazzling. There were cold foggy shorelines, breezy blooming meadows, and dusty dunes of scorching sand; there were ambling streams, quiet lakes, and roaring falls tumbling down granite domes; there were mountains in the deserts, mountains by the ocean, and mountains in the ocean; there were groves of the world's oldest trees, canyons carved by glaciers, and craters blown out by volcanoes—places of gentle beauty and places of thunderous splendor. My wife and I felt something like a moral obligation to see everything we possibly could. Fortune had laid great riches within our reach, and we were vowed not to squander our opportunity. We ate our meals in the car and napped while the other drove, in order to squeeze more touring into our trips. There might have been occasions when, worn and weary, it was difficult to keep going, but with such an abundant land spread out before us, it would have been impossible to stop.

From time immemorial our human race has been called a race of wanderers and wayfarers, a restless people forever setting forth in pursuit of a better life. But as my wife and I rushed frantically around California that year, I sometimes felt that life, far from not being good enough, was on the contrary too good, on a scale we cannot experience except by endless roaming. This whole wide earth is a great Diaspora of beauty, and there is no way to see that beauty unless we travel to it. To stand still is to miss out on life. The reason of my discontent was not that I never found a place worth staying, but that I always saw another place worth going.

I could never envy people who are happy to stay at home their entire lives. We are born provincial; and until we learn better, our own little town seems to us the whole world. The greater world cannot draw and entice those who have no inkling of its greatness. For the expansive mind, traveling is an attempt to experience the entire world. But as rapidly as my car carried me to new places, it carried me away from old ones. I admired each and was loath to surrender any. Traveling made of me a tourist and temporary visitor, and so I always felt at a loss. The more I traveled, the more I wanted something no amount of traveling could give: to see the world not merely in stages but in its total and miscellaneous spectrum. Traveling had added to my finite experiences of the world, but the world is infinite, and I wanted to experience it infinitely—to discover a universal habitation. I wanted, perhaps, to make the world smaller, to condense its vast and sprawling beauty into one precious jewel. I wanted to hold the whole world in my hands like a globe, its shrunken semblance, to circumnavigate the planet with my fingers and sail the seven seas in the same hour.

Such a sublime vision of life was no part of our humble birthright. In the old creation accounts, it was said that the Creator, having made the earth and filled it with richness and beauty, gave it to humankind, the last of his creations, to enjoy. But the world seems to have been made more for desire, for by what means can so small a creature as man enjoy so great a thing as the world?

To the creation stories of old, the science of today has added its own narrative, recounting the origin of our species from forms far older and humbler and demonstrating the depth of our interconnection with all that lives and moves upon the earth. We have learned that the strange creatures that share our planet are not only our brothers and sisters, as the poets and mystics have long known, but our earliest parents as well. We have learned not to think of ourselves as created apart but as an outgrowth and offspring of the world, having emerged from within it. These hills around us, the trees and their birds, the rocks and the woods and the streams meandering through them—all the fine sights that stir our love—are the very source from which we came. This fair earth, now the object of our desire, was first the origin of our being. The scientists also say that our planet was born in turn from the primordial pulsations of the stars. Our delicate and intricate bodies, accordingly, are the blown-off dust of ancient suns. The heavens above us are in us, but we are far from them and cannot reach up to their beauty. We are a scrap of life, cut from the infinite fabric of the universe; a few of the world's atoms in love with all the others; a drop in the ocean, enamored of the sea.

2. TIME
I can vividly remember the sense of expectation I felt when, as a college student, I first set myself to the serious pursuit of knowledge. I read with a feverish enthusiasm, revering each new author I studied and rejoicing in the humblest insights. If I grew discouraged by the slow pace of my progress, I would tell myself that even small steps over time would get me to my distant destination. Of that destination I had no definite concept but imagined it vaguely as a kind of summit of accumulated knowledge, the reward for which was to look out across a panoramic vista of life. "Man desires to know something whole and perfect," said St. Thomas Aquinas, in a dictum that conveyed my aspiration. Impossible though I knew it was to master everything there was to learn, I supposed that the sum of my enlightenments would culminate eventually in a grand illumination.

I can remember the excitement I felt at the prospect of such an illumination and the subsequent disappointment of realizing it was but an idle dream, due to the limitations of memory and the narrow scope of consciousness. We may draw deeply from the well of human wisdom, but we draw with a leaky bucket. Time is both an aid and an obstacle to our knowledge, providing the opportunity to learn and the possibility to forget.

But even a perfect memory would not satisfy me so long as I possessed an imperfect consciousness. It is the nature of consciousness to deal with one thought at a time. One may think a multitude of thoughts only by moving among them in sequence. We cannot be in a hundred places at once, no more in thought than in space. To think upon the conclusion of an argument we must cease to think upon its premise. We may accumulate great stores of knowledge, but we never grasp that knowledge in its totality. Our knowing is always incomplete, not merely because we cannot master all that we could know, but because we cannot even master all that we do know.

The mind being imperfect cannot satisfy the desire for whole and perfect knowledge, a desire to comprehend the world as in a vision. Such manner of knowing had been my aspiration long before I could articulate it and, in so doing, realize its futility. It was never enough to read and fill my mind with rich thoughts, to call upon at my pleasure, for I wished to summon them all at once in a moment of supreme consciousness.

The impulse of philosophers to construct philosophical systems stems from this desire for unification of thought. It is a source of frustration to the thinker that he cannot control the chaos, letting go unwittingly one thought each time he grasps another. To write a book is the nearest approximation of mastery that can be achieved, with ideas arranged in some rational order and fixed together for all time. In the physical object of the book, we achieve a semblance of command over the contents inside and feel ourselves in possession of that gathered knowledge. In this respect books may be regarded as symbols, not so much of intellectual achievement as of limitation. We write systematic treatises because we have fragmentary minds.

The inadequacy of our knowing is due to its temporality. We know only in part because we know only in time, grasping our present thought but not those of the past and future. Every aspect of our lives being temporal is partial and, being partial, can stir in us a yearning for wholeness. As the world is always in transit, we never possess it more than in passing. We wade in the stream of time and touch reality as it flows by, each drop no sooner come than gone. We long for an eternal Now, a moment of absolute presence when the waters might converge and we might taste all of life. But reality, like secret gold, lies mostly buried in the past or sealed in the womb of the future; and of its infinite sum, we hold but an infinitesimal share.

It is true that the future is not forever locked up, for it comes rushing out into the present as the present recedes into the past. We observe this pattern yearly in the changing of the seasons as the ephemeral beauty of one withers into the beauty of the next. Joys of the future will relegate others to the past as today is lost in tomorrow. And the wisdom of old age will supersede the passion of our youth. Life is immeasurably rich, but it gives only as it takes away.

Yet even the giving has a limit when the beneficiaries, being mortal, cease to receive. As the span of our lives measured against unending time is exceedingly brief, we are fated to miss out on the unwritten episodes of the future. Benjamin Franklin, in a letter, once expressed regret at having been born so early in the progress of modern science; for having no higher pleasure in life than to learn of a new discovery or a clever invention, he was pained to think of untold advances certain to follow in future centuries, of which he would have no knowledge. Life goes on, but we do not. Only the outward trappings of our existence will endure: the places we lived, the sights we knew, the works we accomplished, the things we possessed. And just as a mollusk shell once vacated may be taken over by a hermit crab, the external forms of our lives will be filled by others after we are gone. The place we live, a hundred years hence, will perhaps be little changed, and yet there will not be a single familiar face. As if from a page of science fiction, this customary planet will play host to an alien people with not so much as a moment's remembrance for us. The men who will rule the world then, declaring wars and deciding the direction of our race, are not yet even in the world. The stage will be the same and the script similar, but all the actors will be different. How little will have changed in a hundred years, and how much!

It is not only our portion in life to be ushered from the world-scene early, we also arrived late to find the world had already been turning for a veritable eternity. More painful by far than reveries of the uncharted future is the thought of the shut and sealed annals of the past. Nostalgia is the longing to break the seal and reopen the book, a longing stirred not only by the thought of ancient worlds we never knew but even more by the memory of our own past—of our youth in old age, of joy in the season of sorrow, of things loved and lost. It was the longing of Wordsworth in the Lucy poems, of Tennyson in In Memoriam, and of A. E. Housman in many of the poems of A Shropshire Lad:

Into my heart an air that kills
     From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
     What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
     I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
     And cannot come again.

Although there is almost no one who has not sometimes felt these longings, nostalgia has frequently been accused of misapprehending its object and, rather than the real past, loving merely a pleasing phantasm of it, conjured by imagination. According to many a critic, it is dissatisfaction over the present that prompts nostalgia, rather than any perceived excellence of the past. But while the imperfection of the present is very real, the perfection of the past is a fantasy.

A critique of nostalgia would be well in order, if nostalgia were simply a desire to go back in time to a supposed golden age. But I discern in the longing for the past something different, not so much a preference for antiquity as a further instance of the general longing for plenitude. I suspect there are very few of us who, were it in our power, would actually return to those vanished eras and the hardships of an earlier age. We love the past not with foolish idealism but simply as a portion of the drama of life, none the less dear for its imperfections. Fullness of being is not to be found in a simple return to an earlier era but rather in the incorporation of all times into one.

As it is, we possess the past only inadequately through memory and imagination and such things as photographs, ruins and relics. Memory is the mind's cabinet, in which it stores the files and records of past experience. It has, admittedly, a capacity far greater than the eye's, for the eye receives of the moment while the memory is a treasury of years, albeit faded by time. "In the great hall of my memory," boasted St. Augustine, "heaven and earth stand ready for me to perceive." But how dim is that heaven, and how insubstantial that earth! What is the memory of happy times compared to the enjoyment of them? We try to take hold, through remembrance, of what we have loved and lost, but our memories are ghosts and shadows, too subtle to touch. To remember the past is a thin compensation for being without it.

We can possess the past in a more vivid way through the faculty of imagination. Whereas memory brings the past to us, the imagination plants us in that lost world. A book from or about the past can transport us to another era; and that world, though it exists in our mind, takes on its own reality. A vivid imagination is the closest we come to a time machine; but it works only by taking us away from the present. In the whimsical mind of Cervantes' Don Quixote, the old medieval world of knights and chivalry flashed into life again, but only by crowding out the new world of his own modern Spain. In the market of the imagination, the past is indeed for purchase, but only to those who are willing to pay with the present.

Perhaps our most exciting possession of the past comes through photography. With the invention of the photograph came the thrilling prospect of freezing moments in time and preserving them on paper. Fearful of losing anything, we take pictures of almost everything and are often so intent on preserving the moment in a future image that we fail to enjoy its present reality. We fill attics with boxes of old photographs, the running inventory of our lives. But how much is gained from this cult of photography? The purpose of taking pictures is to have them for viewing later. Yet life demands of us that we constantly keep living it; and in our continual headlong fall into the future, there is scarcely an hour's pause to revisit the past, painstakingly preserved as it may be.

We possess the past, finally, through the relics and ruins which survive from years gone by. But these artifacts leave us unsatisfied, too. They are dead symbols of the past rather than its living bearers. To look upon the ruins and relics of our ancestors does not so much resurrect their world as call to mind its irremediable loss. If I see a bust of Caesar or stand in the silent ruins of his once clamorous palace, I reflect not on the greatness of his empire but on the greater empire of Time, which Rome and all her legions could not withstand. In the fall of mighty Rome, I read a parable of our common lot and consider how all that is now standing and that I hold dear must come to a similar reckoning.

Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,
That Time will come and take my love away.
               -Shakespeare, Sonnet LXIV

Time's employment is to erode, and we who watch it sweep away the world must shortly be swept away ourselves. There is no stay against the rush of time. Life is infinite and immeasurable, but we were born to a mortal lot, the inheritors of limits, and have nothing immeasurable of our own with which to grasp it, nothing infinite, except for infinite longing.