every change in the light

----------- [excerpt from article, "'Words on Paper Will Outlast Us':  How Claire Messud Distills Her Life" -- The Atlantic] ---------------- With death, everything goes.  All of it.  In our brains are recorded every second of our lives, whether we're able to retrieve them or not -- of course, we can't retrieve most of it.  But every thought we have had, every smell we have smelled, every change in the light, every embrace, everything is there.  When we die, these moments can never be retrieved.  They are gone.  Forever.

The large portion of human experience will vanish.  I remember my grandfather, when he was quite old and in his nineties -- he lived to be 94 -- sitting in the window of his apartment.  He was French, and he lived in an apartment overlooking the Mediterranean in the south of France.  I remember him staring out the window at the vast open sea.  I was in my early thirties, and I assumed "Oh, he's thinking about my grandmother.  Or he's thinking about death."  But when I said, "Grand-pere, what are you thinking about?" he said, "I'm recalling my visit to an oil well in the Sahara in 1954."

I hadn't known he'd been to an oil well in the Sahara.  It's just proof that we live so many lives, contain so much experience, that even the people who know us best don't know.  When someone dies, all that goes.  All of it.

Things we write down are the fragments shored against our ruins.  They outlast us, these scraps of words on paper.  Like the detritus from the tsunami washing up on the other side of the ocean, writing is what can be salvaged. ------------------------------- [end excerpt]

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March 19, 2014

Riding a bicycle
Riding a train
Riding the wave
Riding down Main
Writing the articles
Writing the refrain
Writing the reality
Writing about rain
Righting the organizations
Righting the ill-gotten gain
Righting Investment Street,
Righting Opportunity Plain...

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