So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever known, if a restiveness, like light and cloud shadow passes over your hands and over all that you do.  You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall.

This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.

Is it not late?  A late time to be living?  Are not our generations the crucial ones?  For we have changed the world.  Are not our heightened times the important ones?  For we have nuclear bombs.  Are we not especially significant because our century is? - our century and its unique Holocaust, its refugee populations, its serial totalitarian exterminations; our century and its antibiotics, silicon chips, men on the moon, and spliced genes?  No, we are not and it is not.  These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other.  Who can bear to hear this, or who will consider it?...
Take away the bomb threat and what are we?  Ordinary beads on a never-ending string.  Our time is a routine twist of an improbable yarn...
There must be something heroic about our time, something that lifts it above all those other times.  Plague?  Funny weather?  Dire things are happening...
Why are we watching the news, reading the news, keeping up with the news?  Only to enforce our fancy - probably a necessary lie - that these are crucial times, and we are in on them.  Newly revealed, and we are in the know: crazy people, bunches of them.  New diseases, shifts in power, floods!  Can the news from dynastic Egypt have been any different?

How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples - those myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses.  Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses, only waiting to see us, once beautiful and brave.  Perhaps everything terrible in our lives is, in its deepest being, something helpless, that wants help from us.