Andando

"Altogether, the task of estimating the length of human life (of animals' we presume not to speak) is beyond our capacity, for directly we say that it is ages long, we are reminded that it is briefer than the fall of a rose leaf to the ground. Of the two forces which alternately, and what is more confusing still, at the same moment, dominate our unfortunate numbskulls - brevity and diuturnity - Orlando was sometimes under the influence of the elefant-footed deity, then of the gnat-winged fly. Life seemed to him of prodigious length. Yet even so, it went like a flash." Orlando,   Virginia Woolf

"Nothing could be seen whole or read from the start to finish. What was seen begun -like two friends starting to meet each other across the street - was never seen ended. After twenty minutes the body and mind were like scraps of torn paper tumbling from a sack, and, indeed, the process of motoring fast out London so much resembles the chopping up small of identity which precedes unconsciousness and perhaps death itself that it is an open question in what sense Orlando can be said to have existed at the present moment" Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography, 217 (quoted by A. Assmann, Das Ordnen der Zeit, 178)