We have been cut off, the past has been ended
and the family has broken up and the present is
adrift in its wheelchair. ... That is no gap between
the generations, that is a gulf. The elements have
changed, there are whole new orders of
magnitude and kind. [...]
My grandparents had to live their way out of one
world and into another, or into several others,
making new out of old the way corals live their
reef upward. I am on my grandparents' side. I
believe in Time, as they did, and in the life
chronological rather than in the life existential.
We live in time and through it, we build our huts
in its ruins, or used to, and we cannot afford all
these abandonings.