It is on foggy days like this that the beach most nearly resembles our movement into the future. We look ahead toward the constantly retreating edge of the beach, not quite able to see beyond the next bend. We walk along in the soft bubble of the present toward some increasingly cloudy and obscured next phase of our lives, lives whose meaning seems to be whispered into our ears with soft, rhythmic, susurrus by the constant breaking of the waves. Only by noticing the subtly changing texture of the cliff face, which rolls like some huge canvas diorama loop above us, can we sense any progress on this strand - though never our position, and never our ultimate destination. Always we are trapped in the dreamlike trance of the present, whose dissolving boundaries shift with us, so that what we were traveling towards is suddenly already behind us, where we were is already lost, and where we are is where we have always been – sojourning on an empty beach between dreams.
This is an excerpt. The full audio essay can be heard above.
