One of the things about memory loss, and I am not talking about alzheimers here but the normal loss of memory as you grow older. Names, or where you left things are the bane of an older persons life and can have been a problem throughout life depending on how your brain works. If you have a busy mind which skips about from one subject to the next then your 'consecration span' is effected. If you religiously log every thing you do with a coating of rational thought, then the memory retention is going to be different.
One of my pleasures is reading. My house is littered with books. Some read, some part read each staring at me from the bookcases or from the table, begging for me, as it were to turn to them and open the cover. There is the unseen library in my Kindle available at the tap of a key, immediately expandable by a visit to Amazon Books, infinitely available for a relatively small amount of money.
All these books, all these words crafted by someone who's life is often encapsulated within the pages, who's thoughts leap out at you, bowling a bumper ball to your own long founded prejudice. A maelstrom of ideas and revelations, of laughter and tears which at some moment in the past you had shared with the author.
Today, the problem, if it is a problem, is the retention of those moments or even of remembering the thread of the story that got you there. Looking at the covers of these old friends it's like meeting someone in the car park who you know but can't quite put a name to. The books as a whole you remember but the detail of the story is missing.
Not quite a clean slate but sufficiently vague as to make one worry, 'where did the experience of reading the book go'.
My Yorkshire trait tells me that I can read them all again for nowt since the impressions and the knowledge gained has become sufficiently hazy for me to start again.
But somehow starting again is frightening since the innocence of youth is now replaced with the ticking time bomb of old age. There's not enough time to do it all again and even if there was one could be forgiven for not feeling up to it since the realisation that knowledge dies with you, blatantly apparent now as it wasn't when you started on the great adventure.
One of my pleasures is reading. My house is littered with books. Some read, some part read each staring at me from the bookcases or from the table, begging for me, as it were to turn to them and open the cover. There is the unseen library in my Kindle available at the tap of a key, immediately expandable by a visit to Amazon Books, infinitely available for a relatively small amount of money.
All these books, all these words crafted by someone who's life is often encapsulated within the pages, who's thoughts leap out at you, bowling a bumper ball to your own long founded prejudice. A maelstrom of ideas and revelations, of laughter and tears which at some moment in the past you had shared with the author.
Today, the problem, if it is a problem, is the retention of those moments or even of remembering the thread of the story that got you there. Looking at the covers of these old friends it's like meeting someone in the car park who you know but can't quite put a name to. The books as a whole you remember but the detail of the story is missing.
Not quite a clean slate but sufficiently vague as to make one worry, 'where did the experience of reading the book go'.
My Yorkshire trait tells me that I can read them all again for nowt since the impressions and the knowledge gained has become sufficiently hazy for me to start again.
But somehow starting again is frightening since the innocence of youth is now replaced with the ticking time bomb of old age. There's not enough time to do it all again and even if there was one could be forgiven for not feeling up to it since the realisation that knowledge dies with you, blatantly apparent now as it wasn't when you started on the great adventure.
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