We live so many lives within our lives—smaller lives with people who come and go, friends who disappear, children who grow up—and I never know which of these lives is meant to serve as the frame. But whenever I’m in the grips of a fever or infatuation there is no confusion; my “self” recedes and gives space to a nameless joy, a unified whole that preserves all the details, inseparable and distinct, next to one another. Afterward I always remember this state as one of grace. That might be one way of describing the whole, people filing in and out of my face in no particular order. No “beginning” and no “end,” no chronology, only each and every moment and what transpires therein. At this point, now that I’ve started writing, there’s one person I can’t escape. Birgitte. I used to think that a sharper sense of being alive was to be found in the forest, that I would be able to walk my way to it between the tall pines, that I would find it while sitting alone on a tree stump with the sun in my eyes, or while gazing out on the sea from some rocks on the shore; that I could only be fully awake among the silent elements. But it turned out that I already had everything right here, in the details around me, that it’s simply a question of being attentive in looking at all of it, of letting myself go and directing my attention outward, and I mean truly outward. That’s where this sharper sense of being alive is found, in the alert gaze on another. It was how I came to understand Birgitte, by observing her attentively.