A man who long ago learned to hold each act in light of the distant life in which he would repent it, who for years anticipated and even treasured, with a kind of half-conscious, terrible clarity, the self as it would emerge from the wreckage it created; a man grown equanimous and wise, devoid of ambition now but, what luck, replete with everything ambition brings - this house, these admirers, regret softened by renown, and this moment in which to gather his brood of wounds around him with an almost paternal pride, as a lovely elegiac light fills the room and all the intact past stands plain as a lawn. Spare me. A man can vanish into what he's done, give himself so utterly to his actions that he becomes, not the wise survivor crawling from the chaos of his deeds, but the smooth and empty shell they cast up. Who would believe this hollow noise is the sea?

-Christian Wiman (144)