Thoughts

We are visiting my parents.  In their basement I found a box of old papers I’d written in college and graduate school.  I remembered several of them; I still think those things about those books.  Maybe my thinking has not matured at all, but I believe that they were just good thoughts. 

The distance between those papers and my reading and thinking today seems very short, shorter than my experienced life.  Those papers seem less long ago than marrying my husband, moving west, having my babies.  Each of those life events is fixed in time.  Thinking, on the other hand, is always instantaneous, at this very moment in time.  Although each paper was dated, the ideas are not past.  They are still immediate because they are still in my head.  My thinking about new things incorporates those ideas, too.  Every moment contains every thought I’ve ever had, even ideas I’ve discarded and opinions I’ve changed.  I felt that those old papers are not part of my past, they are part of my present.  It was a relief to feel that I am still a thinking person, even though I am not doing hard core literary analysis anymore.

I threw the papers away.  I’m not interested in rereading them; I’m not going to reuse them.  The only thing that matters about them is that I started thinking once and haven’t stopped.