then

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

— Virginia Woolf

then is an unusual work. The first half of it began as a commission some 11 years ago by friends of mine in New York; the second half was written late last summer. The newer movement borrows some material from the older, but presents it in a strikingly different way. It's really a very strange and unique experience to take a piece written at an earlier point in life and to reshape it through the lens of the intervening years.

There is an interesting problem in the experience of memory, which is not unlike musical experience. In Søren Kierkegaard’s estimation of the subject, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."