The days are getting [something comparative]

It was still dark at seven this morning. I had just pressed our coffee.
    "The days are sure getting longer," I called to my wife in the dining room.
    "You mean shorter," she said. "The nights are getting longer."
    "Right," I said, "whatever. One of those comparative words."
    My wife harumphed.
    "I knew it was a comparative word," I said. "I can still remember word classifications."
    My brain wheels whirred some more. "As long as I can remember word classifications, I'll be all right."
    Whir.
    "When I can't remember word classifications, then I'll be in trouble."
    "Really in trouble," my wife adjusted.

25 years later: ready to let go

We'll be downsizing soon (moving to a smaller house on a smaller lot), and I've spent much of this weekend removing from our attic the rest of the boxes (mostly) that I didn't bring down last weekend. Much of the stuff I found up there had been...well, "stuffed" is the appropriate term...stuffed up there soon after we moved in in 1983. And not thought of since. Until today. And today we're mostly doing what we might have done twenty-five years ago: throwing it away.

I'm naturally wondering what we thought we were keeping it for. Probably not for any practical reasons, but just in order to buy some time to distance ourselves from the past it represented so that we'd become ready, someday, to let it go. And today, indeed, we're not feeling much attachment to any of the stuff at all. We're long since ready to let it go and be done with it. Dusty boxes, moldy paper...faded or forgotten memories.

My wife did set aside her tassel from the mortarboard she wore for high school graduation (45 years ago), however. And I set aside my "Youie Journal" from 1989, intending before I recycle the paper to try to read and understand what I was experiencing that manic summer when I imagined that The She-God fancied me.

If we've forgotten a book...

In a New York Times Magazine piece by Daphne Merkin about the playwright Tom Stoppard:

...Stoppard posed the quandary: "One of the questions that haunts me—it's a question for philosophers and brain science—is, if you've forgotten a book, is that the same as never having read it?" With a slight twist, you could put the question another way and it would contain all the intrigue and wily psychic machinations that have accompanied Stoppard throughout his blazing achievements and rich personal life: if you forget the unpleasant experiences you've once lived through—if you choose to begin the tape at 1946 instead of 1937—does that mean they never happened? ["Playing with Ideas," November 26, 2006]

The question, of course, is whether we've really forgotten that book. And whether experience of which we can't recall a memory is really gone and can have no effect on us. I don't think so.

Not only does Stoppard's question seem to ignore a hundred years of thinking about the unconscious, I think I have a recent counterexample from my own experience. In October, I wrote a post (footnote 2) in which I referred to revelation made to someone else and recommended to us as authoritative (because "it's in the Bible") as being merely "hearsay" as far as we're concerned. Then, a few weeks later, I discovered that that is how Thomas Paine also referred to it in a book that I had read 50 years ago...and "forgotten"—not forgotten that I'd read it, but forgotten precisely what Paine had said.

Q.E.D.?