Whatever you fail to learn from us today you will never learn.

This sentence is bothering me. I should turn the page that this sentence is printed on, but I don’t, because I keep thinking that, unlike Proust’s narrator, who passes three trees that say this to him, I will be able to reread the sentence and learn what I should learn from it. I don’t think it’s over, is what I’m saying, I don’t think it’s past, I make sure that it’s not past, by refusing to turn the page. I’m not in a carriage, the carriage isn’t taking me anywhere, I’m here in my office at my desk, the book to my left, lying on my calendar, permanently open to this page, lying flat open to this page, because it has been open to the page for so long. I don’t feel the grief that the narrator feels, grief “as though I had just lost a friend or felt something die in myself,” because I keep myself suspended, on this page, in one place. I think, looking back, that once I did feel this grief, the first time I read this passage I did feel the grief the narrator felt, but that was a long time ago, and now the grief is something else, still grief, but not the grief of losing a friend or feeling something die in myself, but a more shallow and yet more debilitating grief, a grief not of being pierced but being numbed, petrified, even, the feeling that each time I fail to turn the page and travel forward, each time I go back to see if this time I can learn what I want to learn from the trees on the page, I become more wooden, less able to feel things, less able to do what I want to do. You see what is happening, I am not in the carriage, I am not moving on, I am becoming the tree, rooted, wood, waving at the carriage as it moves away.