• I would have to say that, for all the reasons that i have to recount this tale, all formalities and theatrics aside, when the colors are stripped away and we are left with a withered and a little more than pathetic skeleton, my only real drives are desire and need.
    Just as all human beings are driven by life, so likewise I am driven to write and tell you this history by both my desire and my need to do so.
    All beings desire company-- all beings wish to know that, no matter how difficult our lives may become for us, we in our suffering are not alone. Maybe this is why I feel to tell you of my life? Maybe just to know that somewhere, a nameless, faceless human being knew the joys and despairs of poor Jacob Edenburgh, who without this account would also have remained nameless and faceless. And I believe it better that you remain anonymous to me, since every night it seemed as though i took the life of some unknown human-- an act so abhorrent, so hideous to one who has never committed it, this theft of a life. Yes. Best that you remain as "the one that escaped the loathsome chill of my hands".
    And yet, as I find myself slipping into the dusty, fading oranges and golds of the evening of my lifetime, the more that I find that this closure is necessary. The need to share my discourse has become like the nightly quest for that precious thing that gives life to all things large and small, grand and humble.
    So here is this, the story of a life that was promised by one that so dearly I loved to be an eternal one, which for all its miseries and exctasies, for all its days and nights, I fear is coming to a close.
    As i write these words tonight, the clouds with their indigo-violet glow cover the luminescent quarter moon. Stars peek out from behind the inky fleece of retreating stormclouds, and the whole Italian night seems to give off its own faint light. The terrace is wet, and still has upon it the clean scent of the evening rainshower that sputtered down from silver heaven to renew this beautiful earth.
    It was still warm, as often was the case during the peaceful Mediterranian night, and i sat out in the pleasant air watching the green valley below where the crops of local farmers had been nourished by the night's rain.
    I could think of only one place better than this in which to spend the last decade or so of an already long and full life, but as that place was no longer upon the earth, then here is where they shall be spent and doccumented. And besides--it would have been too painful for me to write this, the story of my lifetime in the place where so much of the resulting pain and joy had taken place. So much, in fact, that I may have chosen not to continue writing. That would be unacceptable.
    I am reminded this night (as I am every night) of my dear Alistair who, though long departed from this life, still remains as an enormous defining factor in mine.