In my previous post, I left out the final two paragraphs of the Wendell Berry excerpt. Here they are:
But you have a life too that you remember. It stays with you. You have lived a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present, and your memories of it, remembered now, are of a different life in a different world and time. When you remember the past, you are not remembering it as it was. You are remembering it as it is. It is a vision or a dream, present with you in the present, alive with you in the only time you are alive.
Your life, as you lived it, is way back yonder in time. But you are still living, and your living life, expectations subtracted, has a shape, and the shape of it includes the past. The absent and the dead are in it. And the living are in it.
The woman in this photograph is Hmong, and she can be found wandering around the streets of Sapa, Vietnam (I say the latter because another traveler, upon seeing this photo months afterwards, said he had seen the same woman; she keeps active!). Her face hints at a thousand stories to be told, and her eyes somehow sparkle with an unexplainable youthfulness. I simultaneously found her beautiful while also imaging a defensive lineman who has plowed into time and taken some hard hits. And I could only imagine how she saw herself, and the world.
