so far as he had got / sitting lower than oneself

In the Norton Modern Poetry, the editors quote Thomas Hardy's second wife--an explanation, an illustration, a lineage in temporality--in service of a characterization of Hardy as "dejected all his life, even as a child." 

"He was lying on his back in the sun, thinking how useless he was, and covered his face with his straw hat. The sun's rays streamed through the interstices of the straw, the lining having disappeared. Reflecting on his experiences of the world so far as he had got, he came to the conclusion that he did not wish to grow up. Other boys were always talking of when they would be men; he did not want at all to be a man, or to possess things, but to remain as he was, in the same spot, and to know no more people than he already knew (about half a dozen)." 

And as a man, Hardy writes, around 1901, trying to enter a room in a memory, "Everything glowed with a gleam/ Yet we were looking away!"

Oh the endless/recognizable sadness of trying to still. Of wanting to keep that little zone of nothing, with the sun coming through a hat, the self in its proper spot.

I love, love, love how horribly sad and awful it is that we never know that we're IN IT. "Time [draws on], and [wears] me numb" (Hardy again).

I'm also reading Willie Lin's conversation among the stones. She writes filigreed contraptions, skeleton houses around absolute pools of ineffability and heaving. 

In the terrible raiment of childhood,

I tried to sit lower than myself

and looked to the sky, which returned no one.

Neither did its counterpart, the sea.