If he clear-headedly knows that his present projects are solely the projects of his youth, how does he know that they are not merely that, unless he has some view which makes sense of, among other things, his own future? One cannot even start on the important questions of how this man, so totally identified with his present values, will be related to his future without them, if one does not take as basic the fact that it is his own future that he will be living through without them.
This leads to the question of why we go on at all.
—Bernard Williams, “Persons, Character and Morality”
Not Christmas but Yule. The dead walking around, the army of bad intentions at the top finally starting to shamble in the same direction. The early evening of drear-nighted December, freezing the mind’s stream—which I didn’t always know. I was fifteen years old and running a temperature of 101. I didn’t care. I was lying in an arroyo in the dark and everyone was out on the street looking for me. I didn’t care.
That was a mire, and no one less than me expected the climb out of it. Over the next few years I made a mechanism, let’s say, out of components near to hand (there was quite a lot near to hand, that can’t be denied). A kind of vehicle, a kind of self. A steerable boat good for twenty years. There was even a website, the entry to which read 404 Not Found—so Winnicott had the key to the whole production from the start. From 1997.
The components are still around, more or less as before, but I think the mechanism has come apart. The waters never led out of themselves. Despite that they’re nothing like they were.
