And yet were there still more pictures?
Yesterday, March 30, 1988, in the La coruña wineshop in Galicia, Spain, the children sitting between the casks at the back of the room kept looking at the television while conscientiously doing their homework. Or the day before yesterday, in Vigo, on the Atlantic Ocean, there was a kind of marriage of river and ocean waves: one did not incorporate the other, but rather, there in the estuary, incredibly gently with a light snapping sound, one was dissolved into and extinguished by the other. The river's murmur met the tide's rush and, with a stronger murmur, the river and ocean waves crept first to the edge of the river's mouth and then, with the ebb and flow, stole into the land's interior (...)

-- Peter Handke

So, Peter Handke wrote the above twenty years ago today. It is the beginning of a three-pages long micro-epic later collected in the splendid little treasure Once Again for Thucydides. This epic is entitled "Last Pictures?", and I think it could fare as the germinal manifestation of Handke's 2002's masterpiece novel Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, also set in Spain, whose original title is "Bildverlust": I think "Longing for the Picture".

Well, nothing, only it is funny I bumped into this today, having found Once Again for Thucydides laying around in the house and having browsed it while putting it back on the shelf.
In case you were wondering, the book has nothing to do with Thucydides except that Thucydides stays as a early model of the art of telling a story of something experienced first hand, and not heard of-- nor completely invented.
And what about the last, longed for pictures? It's about the same thing, I think, because nothing is harder to recover and easier to lose than a portrait of what we see, what we experience. The greatest loss in everyday's life, is the day itself, our ability to describe it and save it: not what we made of that day, with our careers and loves and cries and tasks and ideas, but what unrelatedly made that day around us, the little slice visible to us and put together by the accident of us being there then, I mean here now. End of the post.