Revisiting

When the child was a child,
it awoke once in a strange bed, and now does so again and again.
Many people, then, seemed beautiful, and now only a few do, by sheer luck.
It had visualized a clear image of Paradise, and now can at most guess,
could not conceive of nothingness, and shudders today at the thought.

Peter Handke
"Song of Childhood"