Connie’s Reviews > The Lost Steps > Status Update

“New worlds must be lived rather than explained. Those who live here do so not from intellectual conviction, but because they believe the easy life is this one and none other. They prefer this present to the Present of the makers of the Apocalypse. He who tries to understand too much, who suffers the anguish of conversion, who cloaks renunciation in an embrace of the customs of people who forge their destinies over this primordial silt, fighting tooth and nail against the mountains and trees, remains vulnerable to the sway of the world he has left behind. I have traveled through the ages; I passed through bodies, through the times of bodies, never knowing I had wedged myself in the narrow confines of the widest door. A life among marvels, the founding of cities, the freedom that thrived in the Land of Enoch among these Inventors of Trades, were realities of a grandeur ill-suited to my slight person as a counterpointist ever on the lookout for repose that would permit me to triumph over death in the ordering of neumes. I have tried to straighten the destiny made crooked by my weakness, and what emerged from me was a song—a song now cut short—that took me down my former roads with a body covered in ash, incapable of being someone other than who I was. Yannes hands me a ticket to leave with him tomorrow aboard the Manatee. I will sail, then, toward the task that awaits me. I raise my burning eyes to the florid sign of Memories of the Future. In two days, the century will have finished another year, and none of the people around me now will care. Here you can get along fine without knowing the year you live in, and those who say a man can't escape his era are wrong. The Stone Age, like the Middle Ages, is here in the present day. The spectral manses of Romanticism full of amorous strife rental open. But none of this is destined for me, because the only race that may not flee the clutches of chronology is the race of artists, who must hurry past the tangible testimonies of the day before and anticipate the songs and forms of those still to come, leaving new tangible testimonies in full awareness of what has been done up to the present day.”