The great forgetting

            In spite of the great forgetting, I still find attractive the idea of texts giving a kind of derivative structure to my memories.  Perhaps it is now the concept of forgotten texts, rather than the great overarching “text” I had hoped to find and read to decipher that earlier self, but the structure of history seems surprisingly unaffected by the presence of particular facts.  And obviously, I have nowhere else to look.

 

A third explanation

            A third explanation is closely related to the previous two, and seems the most likely to me as I write.  It’s that in the first place, I wasn’t really paying very close attention to much of my reading because of the richness of the fabric of the nonliterary experiences to which I was being exposed for the first time (including, during my second year, daily exposure to certain substances at times when I might otherwise have been engaged in sober thought).  And in the second place, I really didn’t do all that much reading, and little if any of the difficult variety, because much of the focus of my “academic” life at Johnston was itself experiential, consisting as it did of classes in poetry-writing, drama, and experiential psychotherapeutic exercise, with my forays into literature and philosophy confined to the lighter classes on offer.  Others at Johnston were indeed reading the Greeks and Kant, but I breathed that smoke at second or third hand.