“In late November of 1968, I spent a few days in a hotel just off the Piazza San Marco in Venice. At 6 one morning, hearing the loud warning bells, I jumped out

“In late November of 1968, I spent a few days in a hotel just off the Piazza San Marco in Venice. At 6 one morning, hearing the loud warning bells, I jumped out of bed, grabbed my camera and rushed to see the famous Venetian flood. I stood in the empty and as yet dry Piazza and looked out toward the Gulf, for I expected the flood tides to come in from the open water. Many minutes passed before to see that the Piazza was flooding, not directly from the Gulf, but up through its own sewers. The indented gratings in the pavement had all but disappeared under the calm, flat silver puddles, which grew slowly and silently until their peripheries touched and the Piazza became a lake. That morning I experienced vividly, if almost subliminally, the reality of change itself: how it fools our sentinels and undermines our defences, how careful we are to look for it in the wrong places, how it does not reveal itself until it is beyond redress, how vainly we search for it around us and find too late that it has occurred within us.” The under-appreciated Robert Grudin in Time and Art of Living.