The Comet

“Childhood, no longer the earliest—less tender and enchanting. It is clearer and nearer: the images within it are neither as bewitching nor as mistily grand. But just like that first, astonished recognition of simple things in the world in the most distant childhood, in the hands of the nanny—so too do the first thoughts that go beyond sight, the first feeling of an eternal, incomprehensible mystery, the collision with a wall that we may be able to cross only after the end…”