Editor's Report

It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn't know it. Had I known, had I cherished this gift, would everything have turned out differently? Yes, if I had recognized this instant of perfect happiness, I would have held it fast and never let it slip away. It took a few seconds, perhaps, for that luminous state to enfold me, suffusing me with the deepest peace, but it seemed to last hours, even years. In that moment, on the afternoon of Monday, May 26, 1975, at about a quarter to three, just as we felt ourselves to be beyond sin and guilt so too did the world seem to have been released from gravity and time.

The last occasion I wrote about time was perhaps four years ago, I remember. But I cannot find my notes, scribbles, meandering sentences, barely coherent and certainly not grammatically correct — words on a piece of paper — a puzzle of fractured shapes inviting assembly and organization, but, alas, nowhere to be found. Where are they? I do not remember. But what to make of time — how hard it is not to return to remembered time, but perhaps this is better than the oblivion of time in the ongoing trapped world of Dante's hell and purgatory. As the diminishing supply of time becomes more evident, the comfort from the undercurrents of prearranged schedules wanes; there is less time but more solace offered from its structure and shape, our life looks like something — there is some notion of a grand plan, a map or a design. With time becoming a one-way street, memory serves as the landmark of personal time passed, time to be remembered as a place we were once, places and lands we once occupied in the past — and only in those special memories where the richness of feeling is most present can we maybe say: I remember it as if it were yesterday or perhaps as if it were happening now.

Memory digs in its heels, refusing to be superseded by present time. That was then and this is now have to be differentiated, for, without t