The thought of death immediately brings with it the thought of the course of life. It is not to ask how you have lived but to evoke what you have lived, as if memory's purpose were to retain the open horizon of all of your past moments in order to deliver them for a recapitulating judgement. The moments of experience are not frozen into inert records but remain present as continuous fibres in the background of each now. As you live turned towards the future you have not so much put them behind your back but silently assumed them as their representative. It is like a choral work where each singer enters the stage in turn, sings a brief solo and then joined the chorus quietly repeating a single note, 'ahh...'. The past only seems to be lost behind forgetting and distorted and rewritten memories while at a deeper level of consciousness it remains present in its unmodified actuality. This means that in the final reckoning there is no meaning, no narrative, no causation in experience only the perfect happening of every individual instance. What it is for is not to exemplify anything ulterior to itself. The tone, the quality of what seemed to be a judgement, then is of an acceptance beyond any ethic, an acceptance so total as to be a love that is almost unbearable, a love into which the soul disappears.