When We Did Not Move

When My Mother Left Me Waiting For Her, [she] Established In Me The Habit Of Waiting And Expectation Which Makes Any Present Moment Most Significant For What It Does Not Contain.

Sometimes I Have Loved The Peacefulness Of An Ordinary Sunday. It Is Like Standing In A Newly Planted Garden After A Warm Rain. You Can Feel The Silent And Invisible Life.

I Hated Waiting. If I Had One Particular Complaint, It Was That My Life Seemed Composed Entirely Of Expectation. I Expected — An Arrival, An Explanation, An Apology. There Had Never Been One, A Fact I Could Have Accepted, Were It Not True That, Just When I Had Got Used To The Limits And Dimensions Of One Moment, I Was Expelled Into The Next And Made To Wonder Again If Any Shapes Hid In Its Shadows.

The Loss Of Seriousness Seems To Me To Be, In Effect, A Loss Of Hope. I Think That The Thing That Made People Rise To Real Ambition, Real Gravity Was The Sense Of Posterity, For Example - A Word That I Can Remember Hearing Quite Often When I Was A Child And I Never Hear Anymore. People Actually Wanted To Make The World Good For People In Generations That They Would Never See. It Makes People Think In Very Large Terms To Try To Liberate Women, For Example, Or To Try To Eliminate Slavery.

He Will Wipe The Tears From All Faces.' It Takes Nothing From The Loveliness Of The Verse To Say That Is Exactly What Will Be Required