Propinquity is a simple word for the number of intersections between two lives.

There are some times when this becomes a terrifying force. But when I take long walks alone the sense of propinquity stays far in the background. This is a small place, but it is a crowded place; it is more surprising to run into somebody than not. All I expect - and most of the time, all I get - is the mood of the weather, the layout and changing of spaces.


The light of stars and galaxies reach us long after the event. The only saving grace is that the speed of these dispatches are about the only constant in our universe, and so time, if passed in great amounts, is at least not distorted in this case.

Distortion of time takes place instead in places not acquainted with light as a constant - the folds of the brain responsible for memory, huddled near the core, or as the ancients would have it the heart, obscured from the laws of physics by muscles and a ribcage. Within these shelters people resist all the time the truth that one portion of time is only as important as the next, or the one before.


If we count things year by year rivalries and affections become clear. But day by day everything is an ambivalent muddle. The needs of life dominate at the small scale. Only if we decrease the resolution can we pick ourselves out, and see all the critical times we have missed because they had only lasted hours or days which need to be given over to some small daemon or other.