"We usually think of time as a river, like the Nile, with a strong, swift current bearing us further and further away from what we have been and towards the time when we will no longer be.
But perhaps we should think of time as a deep still pool rather than a fast-flowing river. If time were a pool, we could kneel at its edge and gaze at our reflections and then beyond them to what lay deeper still. Instead of looking back at time, we could look down into it - we could peel back the layers of the palimpsest - and now and again different features of the past - different sights and sounds and voices and dreams - would rise to the surface; rise and subside, and the deep pool would hold them all, so that nothing was lost and nothing ever went away."
(Katherine Franks, Prologue to Lucie Duff Gordon: A passage to Egypt, 1994)
