So many stories, none that you want to hear. >
I suppose this is a way to record my life; to collect everything I’ve done to keep it from disappearing when I’m gone. It is difficult to know when and how you are getting old, but easy to see your friends’ hair turn gray. Their days are as long as yours.
I was my father’s executor, then my mother’s, and then Pamela’s. Their things, their lives, fell through my hands like sand. There was no way for me to save them.
I used to try to separate one thing from another — a book project, a painting, a pile of photographs, notes scribbled on pieces of paper — but in the end, everything relates. Putting it all in one place at least keeps things from getting lost.
Reading Montainge has given me permission to write, just as his reading of Seneca and Epictetus provided the same to him. I am not alone in this, and that gives me comfort. One cannot escape one’s history, one needs to live in it.
Sometimes you will see a character like this: >
Click on it and it will take you somewhere else. Or you can use the menu in the upper right.
I had a great idea, but it escapes me now. >
“I quote
others only
in order
the better to express
myself.”
Michel de Montaigne — The Complete Essays >
I was looking for a project, but the project found me.
Beware not
of big mistakes, but of small omissions. >
I will try to be honest, to the extent that I can be honest with myself. This is not easy, as it is almost impossible to separate myself from my — and other’s — expectations.
I suppose that is the problem of our time, figuring out where one begins and ends. Reading history helps, since it provides evidence that we were not always like this, and the notion of the self has changed many times in as many different places.
We are the thing, and simultaneously, the idea of the thing.