Sunday, March 21, 2010

Here yourself

Wanting to tell your life story, exploring your own past
and trying to find out what really happened at the crime
scene of your childhood, and why, puts you in the same
position as the person in the street asking for directions
who accosts a passer-by, only to be told, 'Sorry, I’m a
stranger here myself.' Why, when seeking directions,
with a streetful of people to choose from, do we
unerringly single out the one who doesn’t know the
place—who cannot answer our question, who gives at
best a sympathetic shrug? It is then that you realize
afresh that, in trying to understand your own life, you are
both the asker and the asked, the seeker and the sought;
and will always be a stranger here yourself.

1 comment:

Mary McCallum said...

adapting Eliot, you are here or there or elsewhere in your beginning...