As the wave forever seeks the shore, as the pale light gropes toward the darkness, as the sky bends down towards the glimmering horizon and the pine stretches its crooked arms toward heaven - so does the human heart reach for eternity.
We cry out in anguish, we yearn, we stretch our souls in every breath. For we carry within us a timeless fire imprisoned in perishable flesh, and that contradiction is the deepest wound a man can bear. It burns behind the ribs like a furnace. No day passes without the remembrance of decay, making a mockery of all our accomplishments.
Therefore we drown the ache in booze and coarse laughter, in warm flesh and fleeting gold. We throw ourselves into the noise of the world as a man throws himself into a river to forget that he is drowning. Yet the divide is not healed. The crack between being and becoming cannot be mended by the trappings of the flesh. It can only be covered with a thin, laughing mask - until one morning the mask falls, and the face beneath it stares back at us, a stranger we used to know.
Only the mind is in time, the heart is not.