An outsider would not have noticed any visible changes. The same skies, the same seas. The same faces… But they know that everything was different. Their banal everyday life which they knew with such familiarity had been transfigured,  They had been given new eyes and the solid objects and stone faces which filled their space became transparent. It was as if they saw invisible things which were visible only to those who had seen the angel troubling the waters of the pool – the dead man.

Normal mirrors reflect things which are present; but dreams show things which are absent… their stories about the dead man were stories about themselves. Stories not about what they were (that is what they saw when they looked in their mirrors…) but stories about what they desired to be: this is what they saw as they faced their dreams…

Inside our flesh, and mixed with the noises of Death, there is written an indelible story of beauty.  And even without knowing we know that we are destined to this happiness: the Prince must meet Sleeping Beauty.

The villagers remembered. Their stories were the return of a lost time: the past, desired, repressed, forgotten, dead, resurrected from the grave.

…How could I explain to her that the story was always happening in the present just because it had never happened in the past, in the far distant land?

…the beautiful wants to return… its time is sacred; it is reborn every morning; it is the time of resurrection.

…Once upon a time, in a far distant land…” : a cloud of mist covers the narrative to conceal its real time and space which are ‘now’ and ‘here’… the ‘once upon a time, in a far distant land’ is a metaphorical was of speaking about a present loss.

p.39-41, The Poet, the Warrior, the Prophet