Maggie's Farm

Marianne and Buddy,

I saw too much of that criticism and cruelty as a teacher. While I think teenagers are truly the greatest of all ages, one of their stepping stones forward into growth is often made at the expense of another. I was able to make a difference so often that when I left teaching, I realized what I missed most was making 'heros' out of victims. This quotation by Greg Iles does not fit exactly, but it's so smoothly close as to make a silky sound of truth:

"Einstein said the arrow of time flies in only one direction. Faulkner, being from Mississippi, understood the matter differently. He said the past is never dead; it’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long ago before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose provenance dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequences echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.

And who among us, offered the chance, would not relive the day or hour in which we first knew love, or ecstasy, or made a choice that forever altered our future, negating a life we might have had? Such chances are rarely granted. Memory and grief prove Faulkner right enough, but Einstein knew the finality of action. If I cannot change what I had for lunch yesterday, I certainly cannot unmake a marriage, erase the betrayal of a friend, or board a ship that left port twenty years ago."
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