Read it through once

The words, ordinary enough in themselves, filled Genji with an unaccountable depression. How swiftly the locks rust, the hinges grow stiff on doors that close behind us! ‘I am more than thirty,’ he thought; and it seemed to him impossible to go on doing things just as though they would last ... as though people would remember. ‘And yet,’ he said to himself, ‘I know that even at this moment the sight of something very beautiful, were it only some common flower or tree, might in an instant make life again seem full of meaning and reality.’