We All Have Appointments With

And So They Are Ever Returning To Us, The Dead. At Times They Come Back From The Ice More Than Seven Decades Later And Are Found At The Edge Of The Moraine, A Few Polished Bones And A Pair Of Hobnailed Boots.

The Capital Amassed In The Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries Through Various Forms Of Slave Economy Is Still In Circulation, Said De Jong, Still Bearing Interest, Increasing Many Times Over And Continually Burgeoning Anew.

I Felt That The Decrepit State Of These Once Magnificent Buildings, With Their Broken Gutters, Walls Blackened By Rainwater, Crumbling Plaster Revealing The Coarse Masonry Beneath It, Windows Boarded Up Or Clad With Corrugated Iron, Precisely Reflected My Own State Of Mind.

Perhaps We All Lose Our Sense Of Reality To The Precise Degree To Which We Are Engrossed In Our Own Work, And Perhaps That Is Why We See In The Increasing Complexity Of Our Mental Constructs A Means For Greater Understanding, Even While Intuitively We Know That We Shall Never Be Able To Fathom The Imponderables That Govern Our Course Through Life.

The More Images I Gathered From The Past, I Said, The More Unlikely It Seemed To Me That The Past Had Actually Happened In This Or That Way, For Nothing About It Could Be Called Normal: Most Of It Was Absurd, And If Not Absurd, Then Appalling.