How Many More Times Will You Watch The Full Moon Rise?

"Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life.

It's that terrible precision that we hate so much.

But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well.

Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really.

How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it?

Perhaps four or five times more.

Perhaps not even.

How many more times will you watch the full moon rise?

Perhaps twenty.

And yet it all seems limitless."

— Paul Bowles

My wife asked me why I posted this. "Is it a message to me?", she asked. "No," I said,"but you should take it to heart."

I saw this movie and listened to Bowles say this at the end. It was a few months after the Murrah Building Bombing in Oklahoma City and it spoke to me. After Vietnam I considered every hour of every day a bonus no matter how bad or painful they were. This spoke to me.