Irony - The Modern Mode: Either The

Wisdom Consists Partly In Not Pretending Anymore, In Discarding Artifice.

When You Are In Your Twenties, Even If You're Confused And Uncertain About Your Aims And Purposes, You Have A Strong Sense Of What Life Itself Is, And Of What You In Life Are, And Might Become. Later.. Later There Is More Uncertainty, More Overlapping, More Backtracking, More False Memories. Back Then, You Can Remember Your Short Life In Its Entirety. Later, The Memory Becomes A Thing Of Shreds And Patches.

We Live, We Die, We Are Remembered, We Are Forgotten.

We Live With Such Easy Assumptions, Don't We? For Instance, That Memory Equals Events Plus Time. But It's All Much Odder Than This. Who Was It Said That Memory Is What We Thought We'd Forgotten? And It Ought To Be Obvious To Us That Time Doesn't Act As A Fixative, Rather As A Solvent. But It's Not Convenient--- It's Not Useful--- To Believe This; It Doesn't Help Us Get On With Our Lives; So We Ignore It.

In Those Days, We Imagined Ourselves As Being Kept In Some Kind Of Holding Pen, Waiting To Be Released Into Our Lives. And When The Moment Came, Our Lives -- And Time Itself -- Would Speed Up. How Were We To Know That Our Lives Had In Any Case Begun, That Some Advantage Had Already Been Gained, Some Damage Already Inflicted? Also, That Our Release Would Only Be Into A Larger Holding Pen, Whose Boundaries Would Be At First Undiscernible.