The space around the line

...we would assume that what it is we meant

would have been listed in some book set down
beyond the sky's far reaches, if at all
there was some purpose here. But now I think
the purpose lies in us all and that we fall

into an error if we do not keep
our own true notebook of the way we came,
how the sleet stung, or how a wandering bird
cried at the window...

-- lines from The Lost Notebooks of Loren Eiseley, quoted by Esther Woolfson in Field Notes from a Hidden City

"Our life is not the line, but the space around that line", writes Nat Case