Jan 23, 2017
A day is sufficient to its own illusions. You can never recover the illusions of that day. Its sensual qualities–its received images and events, its particularities, the phenomenal evidence that convinces you it was a day at all–are as elusive as the emotional lenses you passed across them. It’s not just that you won’t see it that way twice. It’s that what you saw can never be duplicated either. Memory commits you to the nuance; the fog. If you act on memory you commit yourself on the basis of echoes: unpredictable, faint, fading even as they were generated. No basis on which to inch out across your life, and yet all you have.
M. John Harrison, Bay 1987