With all apologies to Josephine Hart:

There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outline all our lives.

Those who are lucky enough to find it ease like water over a stone, onto its fluid contours, and are home.

Some find it in the place of their birth; others may leave a seaside town, parched, and find themselves refreshed in the desert. There are those born on rolling countryside who are really only at ease in the intense and busy loneliness of the city.

For some, the search is for the imprint of another; a child or a mother, a grandfather or a brother, a lover, a husband, a wife, or a foe.

We may go through our lives happy or unhappy, successful or unfulfilled, loved or unloved, without ever standing in the cold with shock of recognition, without ever feeling the agony as the twisted iron in our souls unlocks itself and we slip at last into place.

I have been at the bedsides of the dying, who looked puzzled at their family's greif as they left a world in which they never felt at home.

I have seen men weep more at the death of their brother, whose being had once locked into theirs, than at the death of their child. I have watched brides become mothers, who only once, long ago, were radiant on their uncle's knee.

And in my own life I have traveled far, acquiring loved and unfamiliar companions; a wife, a son, and a daughter. I have lived with them, a loving alien in surroundings of unsatisfying beauty. An efficient dissembler, I gently and silently smoothed the rough edges of my being. I hid the awkwardness and pain with which I inclined towards my chosen outline, and tried to be what those expected me to be?a good husband, a good father, and a good son.

- from Damage by Josephine Hart

With all apologies to Josephine Hart:

There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outline all our lives.

Those who are lucky enough to find it ease like water over a stone, onto its fluid contours, and are home.

Some find it in the place of their birth; others may leave a seaside town, parched, and find themselves refreshed in the desert. There are those born on rolling countryside who are really only at ease in the intense and busy loneliness of the city.

For some, the search is for the imprint of another; a child or a mother, a grandfather or a brother, a lover, a husband, a wife, or a foe.

We may go through our lives happy or unhappy, successful or unfulfilled, loved or unloved, without ever standing in the cold with shock of recognition, without ever feeling the agony as the twisted iron in our souls unlocks itself and we slip at last into place.

I have been at the bedsides of the dying, who looked puzzled at their family's greif as they left a world in which they never felt at home.

I have seen men weep more at the death of their brother, whose being had once locked into theirs, than at the death of their child. I have watched brides become mothers, who only once, long ago, were radiant on their uncle's knee.

And in my own life I have traveled far, acquiring loved and unfamiliar companions; a wife, a son, and a daughter. I have lived with them, a loving alien in surroundings of unsatisfying beauty. An efficient dissembler, I gently and silently smoothed the rough edges of my being. I hid the awkwardness and pain with which I inclined towards my chosen outline, and tried to be what those expected me to be?a good husband, a good father, and a good son.

- from Damage by Josephine Hart