That was us then.

And this is us now.

She plays alone in a lighted room, as I stand in the shadows below and listen to the notes drift down into the courtyard. What an affliction it is, this strange double vision.

When I lay in a hospital bed at the Salpêtrière, where I had spent much of my working life, I remarked the progression of my disease both with a scientist’s detached expertise and a patient’s painful helplessness. And now I consider my new state with a similar doubleness, observing how, as I am slowly being absorbed into the past, the past is also being absorbed into me.

The particularities of my life are gradually dissolving into a general undifferentiated flow like the mingled waters of tributaries and distributaries, time a river no lock-tender can sluice as it floods its banks, blurring the lines between then and now into a continuous present, its swirls and eddies buffeting me into other times, other lives.

But sometimes the water flings up an object from the depths which snags itself on a rock to arrest the ceaseless flow, and I cling fiercely to that rock, which tethers me still to this life, this world: a quest cut short but not abandoned, and a yearning for Sylvie that is quickened to life by the music.