nyt: gem of the day

Okay, so it's more like gem of the month, seeing as I scribbled this down sometime in early January. But I'm in a dust-and-file mode at the moment, and can't afford to lose this bit of wisdom amidst the papers stacked on my desk. It's from some book review or other (New York Times), author unknown.

"Time passes, and what it passes through is people — though people believe that they are passing through time, and even, at certain euphoric moments, directing time. It’s a delusion, but it’s where memoirs come from, or at least the very best ones. They tell how destiny presses on desire and how desire pushes back, sometimes heroically, always poignantly, but never quite victoriously. Life is an upstream, not an uphill, battle, and it results in just one story: how, and alongside whom, one used his paddle."