The Epochs of Me
In my last entry, I was solipsistic enough to write about one of my own dreams, which featured symbolism from alchemical writings, in which I was in a place cloaked in a black cloud. To me, combined with the other details from the dream, this suggested I am in a state of melancholia and have to extricate myself from some aspect of my past. In the time since having this dream I have been working to do just this.
I use the term to be self-deprecating, but in truth, when I write on here, I generally am not solipsistic enough. I often write a bit about myself and my own experiences at the start of an entry, but at some point it segues into waxing intellectual on some deep philosophical point or religious theology. I'm going to make a purposeful effort not to do that here, and instead do what the spirit of blogging intends for the writer to do, and that is expound upon myself.
I've recently returned to my place of origin, which is the suburbs just north of Detroit, where I am crashing with my parents. They moved away from the house where I grew up a couple of years ago to a smaller house just a few miles to the north. I came back here because I wanted to spend some time with them, as well as get perspective on myself and where I had ended up in life, in any possible respect.
My parents have always been characterized by an excess of sentimentality, the tendency to privilege the memories of the past over embracing the present or the future in full. I observed this growing up, and it holds true even today. What games do they want to play? Why, the ones they played yesterday and in the years prior. What movies do they want to watch? The ones that they're already seen and grown to love. All older people are like this to some extent, but even when I was younger and my parents were in their mid-40's, they already seemed to me to be prisoners of this limiting perspective on life.
Like the apple and the tree, I didn't escape this snare. I remember being 25 and, even with almost infinite possibilities lying on the road ahead of me, I spent much of my time pining for the latter days of my time in college, before the responsibilities of full-time employment, and when I lived with numerous people and so had a social life enmeshed with my home life. Eventually this caught up with me and I dealt with this by moving from Michigan to California to start a new career. While this worked for a time, my affinity for the past accompanied me, and eventually came to keep me mired in my new circumstances longer than I rightfully should have remained.
One of the things that Carl Jung wrote about a great deal was astrology. His contention was that because the night sky was a large empty expanse that was unknown to the ancients, they projected their inner fantasies into it. Old astrological writings are, he claimed, a series of old fantasies going on in the deep unconscious synchronized with the cycles of the constellations of the night sky and projected into it, and so can offer some insight into the structure of the human mind. If astrological natal birth charts seem to reveal anything about us, perhaps this is the reason: they are an ancient precursor to our modern theory of personality types. I do not know if this is true.
My parents are both Cancers. One of the characteristics about Cancers, I have read, is this very tendency to look towards the past with an undue fondness. The advice I once read about making a Cancer fall in love with you is to be involved with them romantically for a time, then to separate yourself from them somehow, and find your way back into their lives. Once you've become associated with their distant past, they'll long for you the way most people long for what's immediately in their present. This is something that I've always felt to be true of myself. I've never read anything in astrology which suggests we should consider the signs of the people who raised us in our formative years. I'm a Gemini, hence the reason my writings always devolve into intellectual diversions, but if there's anything to astrology, then the attributes of Cancer must also abide in me.
I have an uncle who is an INTJ, a rubrik of the MBTI personality assessment. The "T" is for "thinking", which means that he probably gravitates towards living inside of his own head. From what little he has told me about his experiences in grade school, which must have been somewhat distressing, I'd guess that he cut himself off from his feelings. Later, he moved to Arizona for college, in order to study geology, the cirriculum of which was a demanding banquent of physics, chemistry, and other hard sciences. His first few jobs were in this area, and he still has colleagues who work as scientists in different fields. Toward middle age, he ended up making religion a heavy part of his life. To this day he tells me that scientists are bloodless, lifeless empiricists who seek after cold and rational explanations of the world. If that was his experience in life, in college and beyond, for several years, then it stands to reason that eventually his mind would burst forth with intense feelings that must have felt like the result of divine revelation or intervention. This is all speculation on my part, and I could be wrong in my assessment of him, but he insists quite stridently that his own religious beliefs must be true because he feels them so strongly.
What has that to do with me? I am an INFP on the MBTI scale, and the "F" stands for the very opposite of thinking. Why do I tend towards intellectualizing? As a defense mechanism. It can distance me from the people around me, or it can distance me from myself. When the feelings threaten to overwhelm, it's the solitary cave in my head into which I can hastily retreat until the storm has passed. Just like my uncle responds to cold rationality with warmth and feeling, so too I respond to warmth and feeling with rational explanations. But, my rationalistic responses to others are rarely cold, however; they are instead tainted with the same emotionality I'm pushing back against. I'd like to pass myself off as a logical robot, but I give myself away between the words. Historically, when I've retreated into intellectualism too often and for too long, the feelings tends to break back through in nasty and disruptive fashions.
In truth, looking back over my own life, it seems that feelings tend to take center stage, while any intellectual endeavors I've dabbled in tend to take a backseat. I'm fond of going out to bookstores and acquiring books. I always save the receipts from my purchases and use them as the bookmarks. There is a large part of me that relishes acquiring all of this new knowledge and consuming it in the next day or so. Once I have a book for a while, however, I tend to lose interest in what it has to say to me and start to look for the next one.
Why is this? Because the book is an experience of its purposeful acquisition more than it is a source of information. I'll often look at receipts of the books I've purchased. I'll note the date of the purchase, and what it was that I bought, if noted on the receipt. If the items aren't named, I'll try to remember what they were based on the date. I saw one just this morning from December 26th, 2017, in San Jose. I remember precisely where I was at the time, where I was living, what was happening in my life, the experience of reading those items in the store, of reading other books I didn't purchase, and why I ended up purchasing the particular books I did. I can use these receipts, and the books themselves, to take myself back to those places. Even a book I'll never read is something I can hold onto just for the memory of the time and place I bought it, however unexceptional those circumstances might be. The books themselves are anchor points that pepper my past, which I can use to travel back and remember those times, and gain perspective on how much my life and I have changed. I use books the same way most people use collections of old photographs in albums.
It was just about two years ago to this very day that I made the move from living in Mountain View to the city of San Francisco, an hour north of where I had been living. I remember quite distinctly one occasion in which I pulled my car off the freeway onto the street just in front of the building where I was going to live, with a particular song playing, excited about the prospects of this new city I was moving into. At that point, the city of San Francisco was this big unknown to me. It was innumerable square miles of experience I had yet to charter. It's difficult to go back and remember that kind of ignorance. I now have the city of San Francisco mapped out in my head in broad strokes, if not in little details. I know the streets, I know the neighborhoods, I know its haunts and nooks and crannies and the history that many of them belie. Two years ago, there wasn't any of that. There was just this big, mysterious frontier to explore, a big potentiality that I had yet to realize, and it was this potential that I found so very exciting.
The same could be said for the Bay Area in general four years ago, when I first arrived and crashed in an AirBnB in San Pablo. I didn't know San Francisco from Berkeley from Palo Alto from San Jose, and so on. It was just one big metropolitan area that was, as far as I knew, a homogenous tech biosphere. I was thrilled by its potential.
Even now, writing from Detroit, most of the stuff I own is in storage in a unit over in Oakland, just across the bay from San Francisco. I'm happy right now, in large part because at some indeterminate point in the future, I'm going to return there and have to look for the next place I'm going to live, which may or may not be in the Bay Area, once all of these COVID restrictions have lifted. It's exciting because there's potentiality. I could move anywhere and set up a new life for myself. It'll be a completely different feeling once I've actually signed a lease or purchased a house, moved my stuff into the place, and start living day to day in the new place, it'll lose its luster. The actualization of life in a new place excites me for a month or two, but that quickly wears off.
This is the opposite side of nostalgia, which looks backwards. It is the anticipation that looks forwards. These are different, and yet, they are inextricably intertwined with each other. It's potentiality, not concretization, that I find most exciting. This is probably true for most people. And the potentials that we have the easiest time imagining are the ones we've already experienced in the past. I can easily long for a return to things from my past, imagining how great they'll be, but once I get back there, disillusionment sets in. This is the puer aeternus in me that clings to the fantasy of Neverland, even as I try to pass myself off to others as the philosophical Wise Old Man. I use books a nostalgia placeholders because they're a veil of sophistication behind which I can hide my fear of time slipping away.
Even as I write this, it seems that the tide might be turning. It's difficult to say for sure, since we're all so easily inclined to fool ourselves into thinking that we're changing, that we're making progress, when we are not. How many times have I come on here and written about how I'm a prisoner of my past and I'm on the verge of doing something about it? Every six months or so, it seems like I have this revelation anew and have the urge to write about it.
I realized something earlier this year: my life can be divided into roughly four-year blocks of time, the start and end of each coinciding with a federal election year. I was born in 1982. When my memory starts, in 1988, my younger brother was in a severe car accident that certainly changed the course of my life. 1992: I moved from Southfield to Troy, a change in school systems that forced me to adapt to a new social mileau. 1996: I entered high school and became aware of girls. 2000: I go to college and start to live on my own. 2004: I graduate and get my first job. 2008: I leave my first job and move to California to embark on a new career. 2012: I get my first "real" job in computer engineering and become active in the community in which I'm living. 2016: I leave southern California and end up in the Bay Area.
Each of these transition points is marked by a major upheaval, which is at least internal if not external. Each of these epochs in my life is characterized by a particular kind of psychology state, an incubation that was slowly preparing me for the next one. Are these four-year signposts arbitrary? Perhaps a bit. There are certainly significant events in my life that took place outside of these years, but the particular significance of each of these election years, and how my life changed during each of them, is uncanny in the details, which are too numerous and beside the point to recount here. (I even had this realization in 2005, until now forgotten, when I conceived of fictionalizing this idea into a short story called "16 Elections", which would recount the life of its central charcter by tracing the course of his life during major elections.)
The period from 2016 to 2020 was a time characterized by withdrawal, despair, social difficulties, and getting aligned with myself again. It was in this time that I had a job I loved and worked with a many people who I liked and respected a great deal. I regret that during this time I was more introverted and incapable of socializing than normal, and that I didn't adequately connect with more of those I had around me. As for 2020 itself: this year started off with a marked end to the acute melancholia that was so explicit in the previous four years, and which was implicitly present in the four years preceding it. I was catapulted out of my job into a newfound energized state, ready to engage with the world around me, which made intentional plans of doing so...and all this happened just in time for all of us to be pegged down in our homes to ride out a global pandemic.
Last Friday I went to a bonfire with a friend of mine, one of my oldest friends from middle school. Unlike me, he never left the Detroit area, and has lived in the same house and worked at the same job for about a decade now. During the bonfire, he was waxing nostalgic about people that he used to know when he was younger in a way that surprised me. I knew many of these same people, but to me, they feel like several lifetimes ago and they have little bearing on me now. To my friend who has never had a change of scenery, however, the distant realities of the past are more vivid to him than they are to me. People often say that you cannot understand what it is like to be a parent unless you actually become one. As a person who moved away from where I grew up, and who has moved around a few times since then, I can say that, in my experience, a person who has remained in one place their whole lives cannot possibly understand the experience of someone who has done as I have. I wouldn't presume to tell anyone there's a right or a wrong way to live. For myself, I knew I wouldn't be content to remain in one place my whole life, and so had to spring to relocate, at least once, even if ultimately I ended up back where I started.
The part of us that longs to return to the past is often driven by some misplaced urge to correct the mistakes that were made. For the first several months I was living in the Bay Area, in 2016, I remember longing to return to the city of Santa Barbara, where I had just lived for eight years, to try and get back everything I felt I had just lost. It's not that I look upon it with contempt, or that I repress the memories because I agonize about them as a point in my past I can't go back to. My time in Santa Barbara has become just one more phase in a longer timeline, one chapter in a larger story. And it's a story I regard fondly.
Even now, only two months after having moved away from San Francisco and severing the last mental tie with my life of the last four years, the whole thing seems like a distant memory from a past life, a dream that I've since woken up from and whose details recede day by day. I might move back to San Francisco, but I have no urge to do so because I want to go back to something I've lost. It's just one place I used to be, in which I lived one era of my life. Despite its flaws and my mistakes, I only remember it fondly, and I have no compulsion to move back to it to right a past wrong. Unless, of course, the future I now envision for myself includes that place.
That I no longer project elements of my past onto my future is liberating. I'm sure I haven't fully escaped it. The dream with the black cloud covering the earth, the alchemical nigredo, is a state that isn't easily escaped. I don't have a clear vision of the future. The futures I imagine for myself are scary because any movement towards them kills potentials, sacrifices alternate timelines. What I do think is that I should embrace experiences. One must live life in accordance with one's true nature, and I've been living as an intellectual, not as the sensualist that I am. I'd like to think that, looking back over my life at its end, my time can amount to more than a series of memories of books I've purchased, and can be commemorated with something a good deal more meaningful. In any case, I no longer take solace in fantasies about resurrecting the corpse of the past. That's probably a good first step.
I use the term to be self-deprecating, but in truth, when I write on here, I generally am not solipsistic enough. I often write a bit about myself and my own experiences at the start of an entry, but at some point it segues into waxing intellectual on some deep philosophical point or religious theology. I'm going to make a purposeful effort not to do that here, and instead do what the spirit of blogging intends for the writer to do, and that is expound upon myself.
I've recently returned to my place of origin, which is the suburbs just north of Detroit, where I am crashing with my parents. They moved away from the house where I grew up a couple of years ago to a smaller house just a few miles to the north. I came back here because I wanted to spend some time with them, as well as get perspective on myself and where I had ended up in life, in any possible respect.
My parents have always been characterized by an excess of sentimentality, the tendency to privilege the memories of the past over embracing the present or the future in full. I observed this growing up, and it holds true even today. What games do they want to play? Why, the ones they played yesterday and in the years prior. What movies do they want to watch? The ones that they're already seen and grown to love. All older people are like this to some extent, but even when I was younger and my parents were in their mid-40's, they already seemed to me to be prisoners of this limiting perspective on life.
Like the apple and the tree, I didn't escape this snare. I remember being 25 and, even with almost infinite possibilities lying on the road ahead of me, I spent much of my time pining for the latter days of my time in college, before the responsibilities of full-time employment, and when I lived with numerous people and so had a social life enmeshed with my home life. Eventually this caught up with me and I dealt with this by moving from Michigan to California to start a new career. While this worked for a time, my affinity for the past accompanied me, and eventually came to keep me mired in my new circumstances longer than I rightfully should have remained.
One of the things that Carl Jung wrote about a great deal was astrology. His contention was that because the night sky was a large empty expanse that was unknown to the ancients, they projected their inner fantasies into it. Old astrological writings are, he claimed, a series of old fantasies going on in the deep unconscious synchronized with the cycles of the constellations of the night sky and projected into it, and so can offer some insight into the structure of the human mind. If astrological natal birth charts seem to reveal anything about us, perhaps this is the reason: they are an ancient precursor to our modern theory of personality types. I do not know if this is true.
My parents are both Cancers. One of the characteristics about Cancers, I have read, is this very tendency to look towards the past with an undue fondness. The advice I once read about making a Cancer fall in love with you is to be involved with them romantically for a time, then to separate yourself from them somehow, and find your way back into their lives. Once you've become associated with their distant past, they'll long for you the way most people long for what's immediately in their present. This is something that I've always felt to be true of myself. I've never read anything in astrology which suggests we should consider the signs of the people who raised us in our formative years. I'm a Gemini, hence the reason my writings always devolve into intellectual diversions, but if there's anything to astrology, then the attributes of Cancer must also abide in me.
I have an uncle who is an INTJ, a rubrik of the MBTI personality assessment. The "T" is for "thinking", which means that he probably gravitates towards living inside of his own head. From what little he has told me about his experiences in grade school, which must have been somewhat distressing, I'd guess that he cut himself off from his feelings. Later, he moved to Arizona for college, in order to study geology, the cirriculum of which was a demanding banquent of physics, chemistry, and other hard sciences. His first few jobs were in this area, and he still has colleagues who work as scientists in different fields. Toward middle age, he ended up making religion a heavy part of his life. To this day he tells me that scientists are bloodless, lifeless empiricists who seek after cold and rational explanations of the world. If that was his experience in life, in college and beyond, for several years, then it stands to reason that eventually his mind would burst forth with intense feelings that must have felt like the result of divine revelation or intervention. This is all speculation on my part, and I could be wrong in my assessment of him, but he insists quite stridently that his own religious beliefs must be true because he feels them so strongly.
What has that to do with me? I am an INFP on the MBTI scale, and the "F" stands for the very opposite of thinking. Why do I tend towards intellectualizing? As a defense mechanism. It can distance me from the people around me, or it can distance me from myself. When the feelings threaten to overwhelm, it's the solitary cave in my head into which I can hastily retreat until the storm has passed. Just like my uncle responds to cold rationality with warmth and feeling, so too I respond to warmth and feeling with rational explanations. But, my rationalistic responses to others are rarely cold, however; they are instead tainted with the same emotionality I'm pushing back against. I'd like to pass myself off as a logical robot, but I give myself away between the words. Historically, when I've retreated into intellectualism too often and for too long, the feelings tends to break back through in nasty and disruptive fashions.
In truth, looking back over my own life, it seems that feelings tend to take center stage, while any intellectual endeavors I've dabbled in tend to take a backseat. I'm fond of going out to bookstores and acquiring books. I always save the receipts from my purchases and use them as the bookmarks. There is a large part of me that relishes acquiring all of this new knowledge and consuming it in the next day or so. Once I have a book for a while, however, I tend to lose interest in what it has to say to me and start to look for the next one.
Why is this? Because the book is an experience of its purposeful acquisition more than it is a source of information. I'll often look at receipts of the books I've purchased. I'll note the date of the purchase, and what it was that I bought, if noted on the receipt. If the items aren't named, I'll try to remember what they were based on the date. I saw one just this morning from December 26th, 2017, in San Jose. I remember precisely where I was at the time, where I was living, what was happening in my life, the experience of reading those items in the store, of reading other books I didn't purchase, and why I ended up purchasing the particular books I did. I can use these receipts, and the books themselves, to take myself back to those places. Even a book I'll never read is something I can hold onto just for the memory of the time and place I bought it, however unexceptional those circumstances might be. The books themselves are anchor points that pepper my past, which I can use to travel back and remember those times, and gain perspective on how much my life and I have changed. I use books the same way most people use collections of old photographs in albums.
It was just about two years ago to this very day that I made the move from living in Mountain View to the city of San Francisco, an hour north of where I had been living. I remember quite distinctly one occasion in which I pulled my car off the freeway onto the street just in front of the building where I was going to live, with a particular song playing, excited about the prospects of this new city I was moving into. At that point, the city of San Francisco was this big unknown to me. It was innumerable square miles of experience I had yet to charter. It's difficult to go back and remember that kind of ignorance. I now have the city of San Francisco mapped out in my head in broad strokes, if not in little details. I know the streets, I know the neighborhoods, I know its haunts and nooks and crannies and the history that many of them belie. Two years ago, there wasn't any of that. There was just this big, mysterious frontier to explore, a big potentiality that I had yet to realize, and it was this potential that I found so very exciting.
The same could be said for the Bay Area in general four years ago, when I first arrived and crashed in an AirBnB in San Pablo. I didn't know San Francisco from Berkeley from Palo Alto from San Jose, and so on. It was just one big metropolitan area that was, as far as I knew, a homogenous tech biosphere. I was thrilled by its potential.
Even now, writing from Detroit, most of the stuff I own is in storage in a unit over in Oakland, just across the bay from San Francisco. I'm happy right now, in large part because at some indeterminate point in the future, I'm going to return there and have to look for the next place I'm going to live, which may or may not be in the Bay Area, once all of these COVID restrictions have lifted. It's exciting because there's potentiality. I could move anywhere and set up a new life for myself. It'll be a completely different feeling once I've actually signed a lease or purchased a house, moved my stuff into the place, and start living day to day in the new place, it'll lose its luster. The actualization of life in a new place excites me for a month or two, but that quickly wears off.
This is the opposite side of nostalgia, which looks backwards. It is the anticipation that looks forwards. These are different, and yet, they are inextricably intertwined with each other. It's potentiality, not concretization, that I find most exciting. This is probably true for most people. And the potentials that we have the easiest time imagining are the ones we've already experienced in the past. I can easily long for a return to things from my past, imagining how great they'll be, but once I get back there, disillusionment sets in. This is the puer aeternus in me that clings to the fantasy of Neverland, even as I try to pass myself off to others as the philosophical Wise Old Man. I use books a nostalgia placeholders because they're a veil of sophistication behind which I can hide my fear of time slipping away.
Even as I write this, it seems that the tide might be turning. It's difficult to say for sure, since we're all so easily inclined to fool ourselves into thinking that we're changing, that we're making progress, when we are not. How many times have I come on here and written about how I'm a prisoner of my past and I'm on the verge of doing something about it? Every six months or so, it seems like I have this revelation anew and have the urge to write about it.
I realized something earlier this year: my life can be divided into roughly four-year blocks of time, the start and end of each coinciding with a federal election year. I was born in 1982. When my memory starts, in 1988, my younger brother was in a severe car accident that certainly changed the course of my life. 1992: I moved from Southfield to Troy, a change in school systems that forced me to adapt to a new social mileau. 1996: I entered high school and became aware of girls. 2000: I go to college and start to live on my own. 2004: I graduate and get my first job. 2008: I leave my first job and move to California to embark on a new career. 2012: I get my first "real" job in computer engineering and become active in the community in which I'm living. 2016: I leave southern California and end up in the Bay Area.
Each of these transition points is marked by a major upheaval, which is at least internal if not external. Each of these epochs in my life is characterized by a particular kind of psychology state, an incubation that was slowly preparing me for the next one. Are these four-year signposts arbitrary? Perhaps a bit. There are certainly significant events in my life that took place outside of these years, but the particular significance of each of these election years, and how my life changed during each of them, is uncanny in the details, which are too numerous and beside the point to recount here. (I even had this realization in 2005, until now forgotten, when I conceived of fictionalizing this idea into a short story called "16 Elections", which would recount the life of its central charcter by tracing the course of his life during major elections.)
The period from 2016 to 2020 was a time characterized by withdrawal, despair, social difficulties, and getting aligned with myself again. It was in this time that I had a job I loved and worked with a many people who I liked and respected a great deal. I regret that during this time I was more introverted and incapable of socializing than normal, and that I didn't adequately connect with more of those I had around me. As for 2020 itself: this year started off with a marked end to the acute melancholia that was so explicit in the previous four years, and which was implicitly present in the four years preceding it. I was catapulted out of my job into a newfound energized state, ready to engage with the world around me, which made intentional plans of doing so...and all this happened just in time for all of us to be pegged down in our homes to ride out a global pandemic.
Last Friday I went to a bonfire with a friend of mine, one of my oldest friends from middle school. Unlike me, he never left the Detroit area, and has lived in the same house and worked at the same job for about a decade now. During the bonfire, he was waxing nostalgic about people that he used to know when he was younger in a way that surprised me. I knew many of these same people, but to me, they feel like several lifetimes ago and they have little bearing on me now. To my friend who has never had a change of scenery, however, the distant realities of the past are more vivid to him than they are to me. People often say that you cannot understand what it is like to be a parent unless you actually become one. As a person who moved away from where I grew up, and who has moved around a few times since then, I can say that, in my experience, a person who has remained in one place their whole lives cannot possibly understand the experience of someone who has done as I have. I wouldn't presume to tell anyone there's a right or a wrong way to live. For myself, I knew I wouldn't be content to remain in one place my whole life, and so had to spring to relocate, at least once, even if ultimately I ended up back where I started.
The part of us that longs to return to the past is often driven by some misplaced urge to correct the mistakes that were made. For the first several months I was living in the Bay Area, in 2016, I remember longing to return to the city of Santa Barbara, where I had just lived for eight years, to try and get back everything I felt I had just lost. It's not that I look upon it with contempt, or that I repress the memories because I agonize about them as a point in my past I can't go back to. My time in Santa Barbara has become just one more phase in a longer timeline, one chapter in a larger story. And it's a story I regard fondly.
Even now, only two months after having moved away from San Francisco and severing the last mental tie with my life of the last four years, the whole thing seems like a distant memory from a past life, a dream that I've since woken up from and whose details recede day by day. I might move back to San Francisco, but I have no urge to do so because I want to go back to something I've lost. It's just one place I used to be, in which I lived one era of my life. Despite its flaws and my mistakes, I only remember it fondly, and I have no compulsion to move back to it to right a past wrong. Unless, of course, the future I now envision for myself includes that place.
That I no longer project elements of my past onto my future is liberating. I'm sure I haven't fully escaped it. The dream with the black cloud covering the earth, the alchemical nigredo, is a state that isn't easily escaped. I don't have a clear vision of the future. The futures I imagine for myself are scary because any movement towards them kills potentials, sacrifices alternate timelines. What I do think is that I should embrace experiences. One must live life in accordance with one's true nature, and I've been living as an intellectual, not as the sensualist that I am. I'd like to think that, looking back over my life at its end, my time can amount to more than a series of memories of books I've purchased, and can be commemorated with something a good deal more meaningful. In any case, I no longer take solace in fantasies about resurrecting the corpse of the past. That's probably a good first step.