And if you went back, as Jenny sometimes did, they were there, the clues you'd missed while you were reading, caught up in the need to move forward. Something buried in a conversation, a description - you realized that all along it had been a different answer, another person glimpsed but passed over, who was the key to everything. But then at the end you realized that the crucial thing was really something else. Red herrings and misdirection, all the characters and observations that seemed so central, so significant while the story was unfolding. He thought of himself, thought of things that had seemed so important, so full of meaning when he was twenty, or forty, and he thought maybe it was like Jenny's books after all. Knowing that they couldn't believe him but still trying to tell them that it would pass, that they would be amazed, looking back, to think it had mattered at all. He remembered his children's distress at different times, failing an exam or losing a race, a girlfriend. He knew, of course he knew, that a life wasn't anything like one of those novels Jenny read, that it stumbled along, bouncing off one thing, then another, until it just stopped, nothing wrapped up neatly. “Now that his children had grown into their lives, their own children too, there was no one who needed more than the idea of him, and he thought maybe that was why he had this nagging feeling, this sense that there were things he had to know for himself, only for himself. Having no future of my own, why shouldn't I look forward to yours.” I would like to hear it as it sounded while it was passing. I don't find your life uninteresting, as Rodman does. But I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a sober sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accepted, griefs borne. I have neither perfect pitch nor a head for mathematics, and anyway who wants to compute the speed of history? Like all falling bodies, it constantly accelerates. If you have perfect pitch and a head for mathematics you can compute the speed of the object by the interval between its arriving and departing sounds. The sound of anything coming at you - a train, say, or the future - has a higher pitch than the sound of the same thing going away. There is another physical law that teases me, too: the Doppler Effect. “If Henry Adams, whom you knew slightly, could make a theory of history by applying the second law of thermodynamics to human affairs, I ought to be entitled to base one on the angle of repose, and may yet. Look straight along the lines of this reverse.” Or told you plainly but you would not heed. This is the American English definition of hindsight. Said with a murmur when the time was wrong Explore Thesaurus American definition and synonyms of hindsight from the online English dictionary from Macmillan Education. Why didn't they say? Oh, but they did indeed. Those frozen friends who watched the crisis break. Knew all along where these mistakes would lead. Is made worse by the sight of all those who You watch the tale turn back - and you're dismayed.Īnd this dismay at this, this big mistake The statues of your errors brush your sleeve. With the mistake your life goes in reverse.Īnd each mistake leads back to something worse
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