2023 THEME: TIME, MEMORY, AND NOSTALGIA...ALSO NONSENSE

Looking back on my reading for 2023, if I find any themes for the year they would be time, memory, and nostalgia. A few of the quotes and observations I've written down from this year.

 

 Like watches ticking on the wrists of dead soldiers.

--Jean Cocteau

 

If you live long enough, the process of memory ruthless condenses your experiences consigning much to oblivion.

--Robert Kaplan, Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age

 

The alleys at night intimate chambers of of just remembered dreams and childhood

-- Robert Kaplan, Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age

 

Journey taken in youth inform the rest of our lives -- they are markers of of change in us as well as the rest of the world

--WSJ, April ?, 2023

 

The lifetime that I've been lent

in idleness I've spent

    --fragment of a poem that I can't recall attribution. 

I had become my ancestors

--The Growing Seasons, Samuel Hynes

 

Man, if he is ever any good never gets over being a boy.

--Sherwood Anderson

Memories lengthen the land

--Walter Havighurst

When considering new innovations, the Supreme. Court must tread carefully so as not to embarrass the future.

--NW Airlines v. Minnesota,  322 U.S. 292, 300 (1949) 

A library without members is a like a cemetery. Books are like people. Without contact they cease to exist.

--can't remember attribution but I'd like to say Jorge Luis Broges

...at times there came a startled sense of wonder and unrealized opportunity.

--Sherwood Anderson

...time is not cool...

   --NPR interview with a Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (ok, I cheated on this one, it was aired in December 2022)

My observations

 

The right to be forgotten is a formula of truth verses time.

Time is the highway that memory travel down after the journey has been made.

 

Memory is more a poem than a transcript.

These quotes don't fit into my themes but I'm adding anyway because I liked them enough to write down. 

 

Everyone is ignorant only on different subjects.

--Will Rogers

There is nothing as easy as denouncing...it doesn't take much to see something is wrong but it takes some eyesight to see what will put it right.

--Will Rogers

 

Courtesy is the very basis for all mutual respect and concord.

--Erasmus

 

The hoi poloi's hobledihoi poo-pooed the hub-bub.

--My best homemade nonsense sentence of 2023