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"What was once before you - an exciting, mysterious future - is now behind you. Lived; understood; disappointing. You realize you are not special. You have struggled into existence, and are now slipping silently out of it. This is everyone's experience. Every single one. The specifics hardly matter. Everyone's everyone. So you are Adele, Hazel, Claire, Olive. You are Ellen. All her meager sadnesses are yours; all her loneliness; the gray, straw-like hair; her red raw hands. It's yours. It is time for you to understand this. As the people who adore you stop adoring you; as they die; as they move on; as you shed them; as you shed your beauty; your youth; as the world forgets you; as you recognize your transience; as you begin to lose your characteristics one by one; as you learn there is no-one watching you, and there never was, you think only about driving - not coming from any place; not arriving any place. Just driving, counting off time. Now you are here, at 7:43. Now you are here, at 7:44. Now you are.. gone."

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Eurydice

Each person has only one body, like a cell. The soul is bone-weary of this fated shell. With ears and eyes the size of a dime and skin made of scars stitched on a carcass.

It flies through the pupil into the heavenly well, onto the icy needle, onto the bird's hearse. It can hear, through bars of its living jail, the woods and fields rattle the seven seas trumpet.

It's a shame for a soul to be without the body's clothes, with no intentions or designs, no actions or lines. Here's a riddle without the answer: who will come again having danced on these planks when there's no one to dance?

I'm dreaming of another soul in other clothes: it burns, rushing like a spirit fire from shyness to hope. Shadowless, it walks into the distance, unseeable, leaves the table a cluster of lilacs.

Run along, child. Don't mourn poor Eurydice. Tap your copper hoop with your stick, across the world— as long as I hear one-fourth of its noise, the earth echoes the dry joy of every plodding step.

— Arseny Tarkovsky

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Un moment, par une sorte de jeu sinistre, elle renversa la tête en arrière, fixant le point le plus haut du ciel. L’eau insidieuse glissa le long de sa nuque, remplit ses oreilles d’un joyeux murmure de fête. Et, pivotant doucement sur les reins, elle crut sentir la vie se dérober sous elle tandis que montait à ses narines l’odeur même de la tombe.

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