With age, one sees less clearly than before; nuances are less delicate, depth of field more rudimentary, degrees and transitions are perceived less. Nevertheless, as one ages and sees less clearly, one also sees much more. Because everything is seen from the perspective of loss.
We see things, landscapes, beings, from the vantage point of our own mortality, a bit on the other side of the mirror that we already are; but also from their mortality, the slow work on them, within them, sometimes very rapid, of death. With each object our gaze encounters, as long as this city, village, face, armchair, or bed is somewhat familiar, already has a history within us, we perceive what they are no longer, what they used to be, what has left them, what time has transformed and destroyed in them. At point X, someone told us this or that; there was a bridge there; here, Y and I broke down; my mother always said that from this point on, the hardest part was done, she almost felt arrived. Until one has endured a bit, one understands nothing of the poetry of existence, which is made up of accumulation, erasure of details, the relief of time, and the crushing of epochs.
I relate this observation to my old recurring theme, though it remains obscure by definition, of complexity through missing. In this perspective, it's not the surplus that makes things more complex, but the deficiency: the evasion of connections, the memory lapse, the tear at noon.