A century passes and no-one knows what pattern time will weave. And below these larger circular movements the same holds for a single human life. Some will rise and some will fall by the wayside..for some love, a country, a language will be lost or forgotten forever, only to be remembered, unbidden, by the sudden mention of a foreign word, a particular intonation of someone's voice. 

In a previous age there would have been rituals for loss, for transitions... 

The time we have is short enough but is made shorter by incomprehension. We live with our summaries, our dark understanding. 

When the last of the sunlight goes,
and shadows stretching from the shade
of trees and bushes, long hedgerows,
join up together to invade
wild grasses and flat pasture,
turning from shadow into night...

---Virgil. 

~

Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring is a lovely book. At first it seems as if it is slightly staged (this impression is reinforced by the windows being sealed, the house deaf to the outside world, and by the sharp words spoken by some of the characters, as if a definite character, rather than an individual, were speaking them).

PF is, you think, a painter of surfaces-and all the wiser for it. There is a perfect weight to the various characters, such that each person is given just the right amount of space.