belatedness

Yet you come upon them with a feeling of belatedness — as if you somehow missed the revelry and are left to survey the morning’s detritus in solitude.

They are born, if you like, into belatedness.

You need not equate him exactly with his stand-in to see that in “Leopoldstadt,” by punishing Leo for his belatedness, he is punishing himself for his own.

But the cost of belatedness is real for her too: Every time we spoke, she was “muerta,” “despilada,” “exhausta,” run ragged by relentless institutional demands.

The future seems brighter than the past, however absurd the belatedness.