That time, an hour or so before sunset, when you feel that everything is luminous and still and awaiting something, and that all things, perhaps, might be forgiven … You do not know how to complete the sentence, any more than you know how to respond to the ambiguous summons of the moment it describes. Forgiven - forgiven for what? Forgiven for something universal and indefinite; forgiven, as it were, intransitively, for not knowing the answer to whatever it is that must be forgiven, or why forgiveness comes. All you know is that something is not right, and yet today itself is blameless - if still at fault for simply being blameless, as though, in its lack of culpability, it assumes responsibility for all the transgressions it has never thought about.

How vast the world is, you think, and how small we are within it. The clouds that hang in the evening sky will always be longer than us, and less constrained than us; their lethargy seems almost deliberated, like a sober commitment to their future without us. Long after we are dead, there will still be sunrises and sunsets, with clouds to ride above them. Perhaps we were only created out of an obligation they have set themselves to be observed, so that we can bear witness, in our own confused way, to the calm, excessive, intangible meanings that surround them.

In the empty street there are a few clothes pinned to a line in a garden; far above them, the warm colour of someone’s body reveals itself for a moment, as it moves beyond the frosted glass. If only you were young and ignorant again. If only you still chain-smoked and were unloved, were out of work and never changed your clothes. The picture is fervent and alluring, illicit as a prayer. If only you were that smudge of dirt upon the face of the world again, then how much could still be accomplished in the places you failed to inhabit; but today, things being as they are, how much your want of outrage drags down the potential of the world.