"So many places to keep track of. So many sights."

It might have been just outside Munich or Rome or on the new road between Santos and São Paulo. It might have been in New York right after the war or in Budapest or Sydney, and now Miami comes to mind. I was always traveling. When she kissed me, when she took off her clothes and begged me to take off mine, we might have been in Prague. When the wind broke tree limbs and shattered windowpanes, we were in Stockholm or almost there. So many places to keep track of. So many sights. It might have been in Philly. I don't know. I can't recall her name, but she sat next to me and put her hand in my pocket, just slipped it in. Later she told me she never spent a night alone, so we climbed into bed and she kept falling asleep. I kept my eyes on the moon. But what I'm talking about happened before Philly, during the dark days when I would lose track of what happened after breakfast. The rain was so heavy, I never opened the blinds. There was nothing to remind me of where I was. I'm not sure but it might have been in London. She held my hand, then took off her clothes and posed before me, turning this way and that. I think she mentioned Bermuda. I think it was there that she wrapped her legs around me, there in that small room by the sea. I can't be sure. So much has happened. So many days have lost their luster. The miles I've gone keep unraveling. The air is tinged with mist. The cliffs must be closer than they look. I can't be sure. None of the old merriment is here, none of the flash and vigor, none of the pain that kept sending me elsewhere.

Travel, Mark Strand

"...there's not/ Much time for the man and woman in the rented room..."

I think of the innocent lives

Of people in novels who know they'll die

But not that the novel will end. How different they are

From us. Here, the moon stares dumbly down,

Through scattered clouds, onto the sleeping town,

And the wind rounds up the fallen leaves,

And somebody—namely me—deep in his chair,

Riffles the pages left, knowing there's not

Much time for the man and woman in the rented room,

For the red light over the door, for the iris

Tossing its shadow against the wall; not much time

For the soldiers under the trees that line

The river, for the wounded being hauled away

To the cities of the interior where they will stay;

The war that raged for years will come to a close,

And so will everything else, except for a presence

Hard to define, a trace, like the scent of grass

After a night of rain or the remains of a voice

That lets us know without spelling it out

Not to despair; if the end is come, it too will pass.

Fiction, Mark Strand 

. . .

I remember a period in late adolescence when my mind would make itself drunk with images of adventurousness. This is how it will be when I grow up. I shall go there, do this, discover that, love her, and then her and her and her. I shall live as people in novels live and have lived. Which ones I was not sure, only that passion and danger, ecstasy and despair (but then more ecstasy) would be in attendance. However . . . who said that thing about "the littleness of life that art exaggerates"? There was a moment in my late twenties when I admitted that my adventurousness had long since petered out. I would never do those things adolescence had dreamt about. Istead, I mowed my lawn, I took holidays, I had my life.

But time . . . how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time . . . give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.

- Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending