Some day I know that Puerto Alcan - the movement of thought that is Puerto Alcan - must come to an end. It must come to an end because all things that live consume energy, and even memories have limited resources. They will come along and pack it all up again, although I cannot say in advance whether it will be because everything has been said, or because ultimately nothing could be said about it; they will pack away the little twittens that only ever curved downhill; they will shake the wharves and the harbour and pour the dirty water back into the bottle; they will collect up the various characters, almost all pressed from the same mould; they will unbuild the ruined monastery; they will flatten the hills; they will smudge out the deserts; they will fold up the summer and autumn and any other seasons that were ever seen there, and put them back in the calendars where they belong. Then finally they will unwrite the words “Puerto Alcan”, before lapsing into a deep sleep indistinguishable from death.

But that will not be the end of Puerto Alcan; on the market stalls of the night their children, or their dreams of children, will find it all again, among the disheveled memories of that day, repackaged and remaindered, confused, mispriced and jumbled up; and parts of it they will look at afresh, and pieces of it they will throw away. Then there will be an interlude, a respite; other destinies will take place; promises that were made before will be kept, punishments exacted, journeys undertaken. But at the overwhelming end of it, when the long reach of silver fingers settle fast about the blue bags of dawn, what they will draw clear from the monotony of the markets will be a place both like and yet unlike Puerto Alcan, a place difficult to express, experience or contain - like a teardrop reflecting a grey and limpid sky, they will say, - and yet which will resonate within every fibre of their being, as if it were the only moment in which they truly lived. Having no name for the new town as yet, they will turn in their sleep and start to sketch it and colour it and round it out; and when at last they awaken and unpack that new town with its little twittens that only ever curve downward, and lay out the wharves and the harbour and fill them with dirty water, when they set up the melancholy bell that clangs in the ruined monastery on the outskirts of a desert intertwined with hills, and summon the season best suited to the engenderment or extirpation of new life, then they will feel uncertain; they will feel that they have seen all this before, although they cannot remember exactly where. But they will also feel convinced of something else - that even when they saw all of this before, they were actually seeing it already; they were seeing it meanwhile; they were seeing it yet again.