"Time passes. People grow old, fall out of love, go their separate ways. Charis and Weston met in 1934, married in 1939, in the fall of 1945 she wrote to tell him she was leaving him, and in 1946 they were divorced. Weston took his last picture in 1948. He died in 1958. These are the dates. Nothing has caused me more problems in writing this book than the interminable need to establish and verify dates. I hope they are all correct but in one sense dates are irrelevant. The value of a life cannot be assessed chronologically, sequentially. If that were the case then the only bit that matters – like the closing instants of a race – would be how you felt in the closing seconds before your death. (This is one of the questions posed by photographer Joel Sternfeld – 'Is what we are at the end ultimately what we are?' – in his book On this Site.) The moments or phases that make life worthwhile can come early or late. For atheletes, and women dependent solely on their beauty, they always come early. For writers, artists, and everyone else they can come at any time. If you are unlucky they do not come at all. Sometimes these moments are preserved in photographs. The acts – in the artist's (or model's) case, the works, and, in an atheletes, the results – that redeem a life can come in advance of everything requiring redemption. Chronology can, sometimes, obscure this."

Geoff Dyer – The Ongoing Moment