Gail Norman

“I remember a little girl . . . But how can that be . . . Once I was that little Resi, and then one day I became an old woman? . . . If God wills it so, why allow me to see it? Why doesn’t he hide it from me? Everything is a mystery, such a deep mystery . . . I feel the fragility of things in time. From the bottom of my heart, I feel we should cling to nothing. Everything slips through our fingers. All that we seek to hold on to dissolves. Everything vanishes, like mist and dreams . . . Time is a strange thing. When we don’t need it, it is nothing. Then, suddenly, there is nothing else. It is everywhere around us. Also within us. It seeps into our faces. It seeps into the mirror, runs through my temples . . . Between me and you it runs silently, like an hourglass. Oh, Quinquin. Sometimes I feel it flowing inexorably. Sometimes I get up in the middle of the night and stop all the clocks . . . 13 THE SOURCE OF TIME Perhaps God has many more seasons in store for us— or perhaps the last is to be this winter that guides back the waves of the Tyrrhenian Sea to break against the rough pumice cliffs.”
― Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time