There were the touchstones, and there were the landmarks, often distant but just as important, which defined the realm of your experience. It was important to keep them separate, to hold on to their distinction, this was a basic parameter, even though every landmark is only someone else's touchstone. The boundary between the two and the treatment of this boundary was the life, was the striving to know, was the placement of this striving and of the hybrid subjects that arose from it, reborn, bewildered, regathered, ready to start all over again. For the one who strives to know there is always everything yet to know since his object is imaginary, a product of the striving, but with a fiendish twist so that it never comes to know itself in this way, never becomes simple knowing. It can't untie the knot but only draw it tighter. Well then, eventually it will snap, no need of a Hercules, and until then, or more accurately in the until that is its prior, time folds around and around as you and your younger selves - and your alternate futures - exchange looks, draw up the tally of hopes and expectations, fires, floods and winds, that delivered and destroyed, the promises, the infinities in a poem, the finally accepted, but never agreed-to boundary between the ideal and the real.