Ofterdingen and Kropotkin

He enumerates: the people we used to know; the people who died; the people we grew tired of; the people who were waiting for a different life to come along when we knew them; the people none of us really knew; the people who showed up and left again so quickly that they only left an image dissolving in a doorway; the people who hung around for years familiar as an old shoe and one day transformed themselves, changed everything from the ground up, flew off like butterflies or crashed to earth from a preposterous height; the people who withdrew, monastically, into a harsh discipline of silence; people who cleaned up their acts and went nowhere with them; people we envied their great looks, their money, their mastery of situations, who crumbled physically and mentally collapsed after decades of furtive dissipation; the people we still know but never see; the people we disliked for years, but came to appreciate; the people we liked at first and grew to despise after long periods of almost unconscious study; people we wanted to sleep with but didn't; people we slept with impulsively, more or less by accident; people we yearned for and made fools of ourselves over, who rejected us then, and years later, when everything that inflamed us about them had long sputtered out, attached themselves to us with fierce unwanted desire; the people who lived in a different world, and mistook us for other kinds of people than we were.
G.Indiana, Do everything in the dark, 12