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March 23, 2009
staving off stupidity
I'm rolling back my odometer.
It's not by design, but nonetheless, in most facets of my life I suddenly find myself looking backwards. I'm taking a class for the first time in forever. I've lost some weight, so I've been unpacking clothes from 8 years ago. I've reconnected with friends from 10 or more years ago. It wasn't until I excavated my college notes, though, that I started to note the patten.
I can't speak for others my age, but I'm ever-aware of my intellectual degradation. Where my contribution to a conversation about, say, music used to be "You know, Bach is a bit mathematical for my tastes. If I'm going for Baroque—ha, ha!—I'll reach for Handel," nowadays it's just a private thought: Fuck. I used to know something about this.
I hate that I no longer know why planets momentarily go backwards on the ecliptic, or exactly how much electricity is lost to resistance in power lines. I hate that I can't think of a single example of an object complement. I hate that I can't name all the composers who died of syphilis they'd contracted from Clara Schumann. The quadratic formula...actually, I don't much mind forgetting that. Time can keep it. Oh, who are we kidding? You have to know something once in order to forget it.
And thus it's not self-betterment that drives me to revisit my college notes; it's self-preservation. My younger self is tutoring my intellectually enfeebled self.
My younger self was apparently an arrogant little peckerwood. He wrote a lot of snotty asides about his professors. I like him.
posted by john at 12:12 AM • permalink