“But how can you do justice to a subject in six hundred words?”

You can’t. Not in six hundred or six hundred thousand.

In America we have a check-off mentality. (Check off, two words, not the Russian genius.) We use adjectives like “definitive” or say, “Oh yeh, I’ve been to London.” We speak of “bucket lists,” as if alighting at an address equaled knowing it.

In four thousand daily missives I’ve “done” lots of subjects, some repeatedly, but “done justice” to none. No more can a bowl of cherries be “definitively” painted. The most we can glean of truth is a glimpse, a momentary a-hah, which flashes like a firefly in the dark. You and I will never know each other – I will never know myself – but we may glimpse each other and from those glimpses create images as Protean and mutable as a snowman in the sun. Art, one might say, is the conveyance of glimpses over space and time.

Recently a sister died suddenly. The suddenness of her death startled me. But more startling, haunting, was how little of her I retained. We were not estranged. She lived a continent away and our family’s haphazard about “keeping up.” She dwelled vividly in my mind, as siblings will, but that image was composed of glimpses decades distant. If asked, I’d have said I knew her, of course I knew her, she was my sister, but I didn’t know her at all.

The most we can know of another, however intimate, is glimpses, from which we construct a character we mistake for actual. I know Jane, I’d say, pretty well. If not in the same room, we live our lives within earshot. In some respects, she knows me better than I do myself. Yet often I find myself wondering what she’s thinking – really thinking – behind her amiable words.

I write to exist. For where else do we exist except in others’ minds? This mania is ludicrous: of course we all vanish; our eventual nonentity may be our only certainty. I should relax. Yet my fingers can’t stop scribbling against this erasure. That phrase “do justice to” is a mirage: no person or subject can be known. Only that’s not true! Don’t I know Shakespeare and Thoreau and the makers I love – intimately – much better than my sister? Isn’t such an extension – in time – worth striving for?

Mortality these days is on my mind. I feel Death’s fetid breath. Death is only a worry, dog-pal Henry reminds me, if you worry about it. Granted. But who can control the movements of their mind? At the gates of perception, no burly guard forestalls intruders.

Of our selves only glimpses remain. Let me buff mine to their highest gloss. Let me make our moment together memorable. That, I suppose, is my project – not to teach, preach, screech, but reach -- past today into a companionable tomorrow.

Since there is no justice, one cannot “do justice.” But one can do more, better. The folks I cherish are those who make the most of their moment, who see being as a chance not a chore. They vivify the time by inhabiting it intensely. Eager to go, they hate saying goodbye.

Robert Frost wrote a beautiful poem about glimpses, a touchstone for sixty years. It describes my lifelong yearning – to gaze at a thing and see – “something … more of the depths”.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedFor Once, Then, Something

Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbsAlways wrong to the light, so never seeingDeeper down in the well than where the waterGives me back in a shining surface pictureMe myself in the summer heaven godlikeLooking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,Something more of the depths—and then I lost it.Water came to rebuke the too clear water.One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a rippleShook whatever it was lay there at bottom,Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.