"It was not so much any one example, any one event, which I recollected which was important, but the flow, the texture of events, for meaning is never in the event but in the motion through event. Otherwise we could isolate an instant in the event and say that this is the event itself. The meaning. But we cannot do that. For it is the motion which is important. And I was moving. I was moving back through time into my memory. They say the drowning man relives his life as he drowns. Well, I was not drowning in water, but I was drowning in West. I drowned westward through the hot brass days and black velvet nights. It took me seventy hours to drown. For my body to sink down to the very bottom of West and lie in the motionless ooze of history, naked on a hotel bed in Long Beach, California."
from All the Kings Men by Robert Penn Warren