Like a ghost on the highlands howling proud

He sat down in one of those olive gardens, and, all within and around him turning still to reverie, the course of his own life hitherto seemed to retire from him into some other world, distinct from the point at which he was now placed to watch it, like the distant road below, over which he had traveled that morning across the Campagna. Through a dreamy land he could see himself moving, as if in another life, detached from the present, and like another person, through all his fortunes and misfortunes, passing from point to point, weeping or delighted, escaping from various dangers. And the vision brought, first of all a forcible impulse of nothing else than gratitude, as if he must actually look round for some one to share his joy with - to whom he might tell of it, as a relief.

That's Pater, from Marius the Epicurean - just past the middle of the book, and immediately following the death of Aurelius's son. The book's plot, despite the apparent drama my last sentence ascribes it, is indiscernible: airy and non-linear, it's as though the usual events of a story were replaced with shades of light. It's easy to start and stop the book, to forget what one's read, or to recall it hazily while searching after some other, more useful memory. I've read eight pages this afternoon, and now have set it aside. Retaining so little from it, I am nevertheless (or for that very reason) not eager to see it finished.

All day the sky has been overcast, the clouds occasionally darkened by the weight of rain, but now, as it sets, the sun has rent through them, and a sliver of silver light falls across the bookshelves of my office. I'm shirtless, in pine green sweatpants, and am drinking a cup of lukewarm tea that I made some time ago, then, leaving it to steep on the kitchen counter, forgot. I'm continously distracted this September, my thoughts in transit always: from here to Virginia, from Virginia to here, and never alone or begrudging the journey.

Sunday, on a full train to Philadelphia, I chose an empty seat by a young man I knew from my days as a barrista at Millennium. His name, like mine, is Greg, and, like me, he is slim, olive-skinned, dark haired. Were he shorter or I taller, we might be - though not quite mirror images - at the least uncannily similar in appearance. Though we know each other vaguely, and I have more than once attended a party at his apartment, we have never spoken to each other. And neither did we Sunday on the train. Each of us, in doubled poses, sat with crossed leg, a book open on our respective laps: on mine Modernism and the Ideology of History, on his The Q Factor. When we arrived in Philadelphia we climbed the stairs together to the Station, and then, under the gaze of the winged statue by the north entrance, we parted ways, he turning left to the taxi stand and myself right to the dirty underworld of the El.

There is no real significance to this passing, no justification for what my mind has made of it. But I felt, as we separated in Philadelphia, that until that moment atop the staircase we had been the same, and that it was not him that left to catch a cab home, but some previous me - and that it was then, there, suddenly that I was given to see my past leave off and travel on without me.

There's much writing to be done now, much reading too. Preparations for my class tomorrow. Assignments to draft. And poetry to set its course again in The Library. And between my muse and I an echo, and a line I'd written previously that I'm remembering now, a promise: Ho, tell 'im what's to come. Hi' it non in werdsome phrases. Assay, essene, in keen greene words: do not d-nay whithout him.