1922. There she was, the first time I ever saw her, sailing along in her loose black skirts, her lovely face above a long-boned frame, on the cinder path of the university, hidden by tree trunks and then revealed, so that she whirred in my eyes like a film reel, a shadow half-ruined by sunlight under the famous plane trees. Her blouse so white, with the soft bosom moving plainly within, that it was a bright shield in the underwood. And myself still very young, when the brain seemed to brook no real thought of the past or the future -- the movement of time and the world stilled. I watched her from under the dark arch of the entrance to the quadrangle. It was still my first year in the university, in the time of the civil war.
Sebastian Barry, The Temporary Gentleman (2014)
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