Distilled in a blog

   

Subject: Distilled in a blog.

One of the most disturbing things about growing old is that as I look at the four hundred or so books I have lining my bedroom (the rafters just about bear the load)  they are becoming a blank canvas in that I can't remember much if any of the detail or what they are about.
It suggests that if I didn't buy another book, I would actually have something to read until I die without having to buy another and more to the point it suggests that all the stories and information I gathered reading them has disappeared like the rabbit down its hole. This has a disturbing effect since I have prided myself for making the effort to read and find out only to discover it was all a waste of time as I approach a blank slate once again.
Is this the sum total of our endeavours, the result of being inquisitive and instructive. Have all those hours reading been a mistake, a waste of good drinking time !!
It highlights the fact that not only are we finite but also frail. Frail in that area we most prided ourselves, that of having a memory which enabled us to draw conclusions.
Without conclusions what are we but a kaleidoscope of unrelated images, moments of recognition without cognisant awareness. All those years of tinkering around the edge of knowledge, of putting some semblance of order into the world we observe and making our home comfortable within that recognition.
Shall I start again on the top shelf. John le Carre sitting next to Huxley, Alan Clarks Diaries nestling up to D H Lawrence, Walter Greenwoods "Love on the Dole" competing with Philip Roth's  "American Pastoral. "Berlin" by Antony Beevor side by side with Churchill's War and Hiscocks "Cruising under Sail".  Solzhenitsyn to Arnold Bennett Orwell, to J B Priestly, Gunter Grass to Voltaire. All with a tale to tell, never mind the books written on the causes of the Financial Collapse or Black Holes in the Universe, it was all pertinent once and still is in a funny sort of way but our specific take on what we read will die with us, as if "we" had never existed.

That cultivated personality which defines us, so relevant to our effort to understand, has but a few years to live and yet it was so personal. All our journeys are different each unique in that our exposure to things is different and the formulation of our intellect is also so different. If we could bottle our composite experience and hand it down it wouldn't be so bad but to lose it all in a heartbeat, 'or rather the absence of one', seems more than a pity. 

It used to be thought that your children were the depositories of your learning but with a fast moving world the children find little relevance in your knowledge, still less in the factors which made you what you are. 

Cryogenics might be one solution. We could all become a bottle on a shelf, to be sampled when appropriate, like a dusty book in the depths of a reference library.

The super sensitive, emotional, task specific human has no or little value in this world of bits and bytes, other than we might find storage in "the cloud" but only if you have taken the time to distil who you are and what you care about in the digital format of a - blog perhaps !!!