The Far Middle

Because I Have little Regard for Privacy

Have you ever noticed how year after year, the last one seems like such a time of immaturity? Without fail I determine that I’ve grown up immensely in just a few, short months. Like the peeling of an onion, I’ve shed layer upon layer of naivety.

Retrospect always seems to put us on a pedestal. It is good to feel this way; it is good to have such direction. This is how I want to feel everyday. I want to awake and feel like the Anthony of yesterday is gone, buried so far beneath the new me that he is nearly unrecognizable by comparison. I want to be evolving with such swiftness, to be so avant-garde, as to be appear an anachronism. And what is more, I want to be changing always for the better. 

Some people, I am told, have memories like computers, nothing to do but punch the buttons and wait for the print-out. Mine is more like a Japanese library of the old style, without a card file or an indexing system or any systematic shelf plan. Nobody knows where anything is except the old geezer in felt slippers who has been shuffling up and down those stacks for sixty-nine years.

—Wallace Stegner, The Spectator Bird (via classicpenguin)