Recognizing What Matters — What Happens in the Night

[Image: “Boardwalk Diptych,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) Diptyches and triptyches, for me, always pose an interesting question: no matter how artfully the several scenes combine to form one scene, what is happening in the interstices? There always seems to be something, y’know, going on in that blank space — some story, some scene, some whole thing to which we have no conscious access. Even more interestingly, the artists themselves seem completely unaware of the possibilities in this hidden world…]

This week, from whiskey river (and as always, just one gem among the handful):

How many moons have I been too busy to notice? Full moons, half moons, quarter moons facing those thousands of suns, watching them bringing the years up, one piece at a time. Even the dark phases of moon after moon, gray stoppers plugged into a starry sky, letting a little light leak out around the edges. By my reckoning, almost a thousand full moons have passed above me now, and I have been too busy and self-absorbed to be thankful for more than a few, though month after month they have patiently laid out my shadow, that velvety cloak that in the moonlit evenings waits for me.

(Ted Kooser [source — scroll down and click on the Read an Excerpt link])

Over the last week, I read Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes — a biography of the author by his long-time personal assistant. It pays, I think, extraordinarily well-balanced attention to Pratchett’s life and work, but also to the illness, posterior cortical atrophy (PCA — a rare type of early-onset Alzheimer’s), which would eventually terminate both. Here’s a key passage, which brings all of that together:

…nothing would top for Terry the recollection of driving back to Rowberrow on the night of [his daughter’s] birth, with the baby safely delivered and all well, and with, inside him, the deep satisfaction known to new fathers of a job well done, albeit completely by someone else. And all those years later, after his diagnosis, confronting the bewildering thought that the disease which had decided to lodge itself in his brain might one day empty his mind of its contents, this, very specifically, was the memory that Terry said he lived in fear of losing — the memory whose possible erasure he could not bear to contemplate. Because the way he saw it, who, really, would Terry Pratchett even be if he could no longer recall heading home in the dark and the snow that December night, with the Morris van sliding as it pulled up the hills but pushing on? Who would he really be if he didn’t remember parking by the house and walking gingerly up the slippery path and yet still going down flat on his face in the ice, and finding it only hilarious in the circumstances because all of a sudden he was a father and at that point what else mattered?

(Rob Wilkins [source])

It’s funny how the mind does its own thing, independently of our intentions — offering up scraps of memory or random trivia at moments not just when our guard is down, but when our guard is fully engaged: when we’re focused on a task, when we’re determined to do the one thing (whatever it is) which we must do, suddenly there’s this little barricade thrown in our way. It reminds me of driving on a suburban street on which you haven’t driven for a while, and suddenly you realize you’ve just seen a speed hump ahead sign in the split-second before the car’s underbody makes the point more forcefully…

Nighttime, falling-asleep time, is fertile ground for these attention-grabbing moments. I think it’s one reason why consciousness so fascinates us: it seems like an independent entity living a separate life in our heads. When we relax our grip on waking life, it grasps the reins, looks behind to satisfy itself we’re all right, and then finally canters off into the next several hours’ adventures.