A man enters a city after many years away and understands, before anyone speaks, that the place has continued, with perfect manners, in his absence. The old gates are gone, the market has moved. He pauses where his father once bought pears from a woman with silver hair, and there, amid the ordinary commerce of bread, cloth, coin, and complaint, he feels the full insult of continuity: life has proceeded without ceremony. He had imagined return as a kind of verdict, a moment in which every lost hour would present itself for judgment, yet the city offers him a cup of water, a room above a stable, and the blank courtesy reserved for strangers. By evening he has learned the whole lesson; the past can only amount to something when it is disciplined into form. So he takes a table near the window, orders wine he can barely afford, and begins to write with the calm brutality of a man who has finally ceased asking the world to remember him.
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