When did this happen last for you? To regard something for a long time without getting distracted and obsessing about people's expectations and assumptions and your own felt inadequacy. Where’s the self? More a performance, an image, created for others, without anchor or gravity.

At times, though, you could feel your self, the edges of it, usually in things outside of yourself: literature, the contemplation of nature, a long, quiet moment in a film, paintings or poems that evoked memories or nurtured dreams. Writing, always: what is a diary but a stubborn act of self-invention?

Altogether these are things that pose another, more welcoming realm: a network of refuges, in which extinct languages are spoken under an enduring shade. In it, you could imagine your self: a composite of more than others, a composite of the world.

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