It is important to begin when everything is already over… There were worse jokes his blood might have played on him. Its message might have read: All beginnings imply an apocalypse… He awoke the next morning tangled in first lines like wrinkled sheets.
“Above all gifts we most should prize
The wisdom that makes others wise;
To others when ourselves are dust
We leave behind this sacred trust,
We may not know, when we are gone,
The good we shall on earth have done;
Enough in going is the thought
For once we acted as we ought.”
Walter Savage Landor