*O do you imagine/ said fearer to farer,
That dusk will delay on your path to the pass,
Your diligent looking discover the lacking
Your footsteps feel from granite to grass?'

—W. H. Auden

The life of an individual is in many respects like a
child's dissected map. If I could live a hundred years,
keeping my intelligence to the last, I feel as if I could
put the pieces together until they made a properly
connected whole. As it is, I, like all others, find a
certain number of connected fragments, and a larger
number of disjointed pieces, which I might in time
place in their natural connection. Many of these
pieces seem fragmentary, but would in time show
themselves as essential parts of the whole. What
strikes me very forcibly is the arbitrary and as it were
accidental way in which the lines of junction appear
to run irregularly among the fragments. With every
decade I find some new pieces coming into place.
Blanks which have been left in former years find their
complement among the undistributed fragments. If
I could look back on the whole, as we look at the
child's map when it is put together, I feel that I
should have my whole life intelligently laid out
before me... .

—Oliver Wendell Holmes