Les perdus : résonance

"...So for a long time, possessing just the photocopy of the front of that picture, I could only scrutinize Smiel's face, and maybe as I looked at it- (...)- it would occur to me how easy it is for someone to become lost, forever unknown. There, after all, was Schmiel, with that face, with a name that people still uttered, however infrequently, with some kind of history and a family whose names we knew, or thought we knew; and yet just next to him was this other man about whom nothing could ever be known, as good, it seemed to me as I looked at the picture,as if he'd never been born.
...
At night, I think about these things. I'm pleased with what I know, but now I think much more about everything I could have known, which was so much more than anything I can learn now and which now is gone for ever.
What I do know now is this : there's so much you don't really see, preoccupied as you are with the business of living; so much you never notice, until suddenly, for whatever reason -you happen to look
like someone long dead; you decide, suddenly, that it's important to let your children know where they came from- you need the information that people you once knew always had to give you, if only you asked. By the time you think to ask, it's too late."
                                                                          Daniel Mendelsohn
                                                                The Lost   A search for six of six million



      "perdus, sans mâts, sans mâts ni fertiles ilots".....  Mallarmé