from John Ashbery, 'The New Spirit'

When one is in one's late thirties, ordinary things – like a pebble or a glass of water – take on an expressive sheen. One wants to know more about them, and one is in turn lived by them. Young people might not envy this kind of situation, perhaps rightly so, yet there is now interleaving the pages and indifference to suffering a prismatic space that cannot be seen, merely felt as the result of an angularity that must have existed from earliest times and is only now succeeding in making its presence felt through the mists of helpless acceptance of everything else projected on our miserable, dank span of days. One is aware of it as an open field of narrative possibilities. Not in the edifying sense of the tales of the past that we are still (however) chained to, but as stories that tell only of themselves, so that one realizes one's self has dwindled and now at last vanished in the diamond light of pure speculation. Collar up, you are lighter than air. The only slightly damaged bundle of receptive nerves is humming again, receiving the colorless emanations from outer space and dispatching dense. Precisely worded messages. There is room to move around in it, which is all that matters. The pain that drained the blood from your cheeks when you were young and turned you into a whitened specter before your time is converted back into a source of energy that peoples this new world of perceived phenomena with wonder. – John Ashbery, 'The New Spirit'