Insomnia

Insomnia before your first day (afternoon) of grad school is less than ideal. In fact, it's somewhat annoying. But I can't seem to convince my mind to shut off. What with moving into a new apartment and community, starting school, trying to figure out what to do with my days (since classes are all in the afternoon/evening), and catching up with friends after a productive summer, I'm all awhirl. But these aren't the only things keeping me up.

Forgetting. Sometimes it's the easiest part, and sometimes it's the hardest. Isn't life funny that way? It's scary, really, how quickly one forgets one's previous selves. Ok, let's not kid ourselves here--how quickly I forget my previous selves.

Joan Didion's essay "On Keeping a Notebook" has always resonated with me. I'm not going to be able to write about it comprehensively at 4:00 am, but I've always believed this to be one of her most perceptive lines:

"I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not."

That line in specific remained in my head; I just went and took down the book to copy it into this post. I intended to proceed from there to my own ruminations on the topic of self and forgetting, but I find that, after all, Didion has done it for me. The proceeding lines read (eerily enough):

"Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were."

And it's true. And it's completely terrifying--especially when one has a sneaking suspicion that one is about to lose a person who was better, in many ways, than the one she is now. (I'm back to 'one' again. Forgive me.)

For instance, my previous self didn't write self-indulgent spur-of-the-moment blog posts in the middle of the night and actually post them.

Clearly, I'm degenerating.
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How in the world am I to know who and what to believe about myself?

(And don't even think about telling me to block out the other voices and listen to my heart or to my mind. If it was that easy, don't you think I'd have figured it out on my own?)
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Water and Reflections

"Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries--stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded forever."
--Moby Dick, page 28

"...And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all."
--Moby Dick, page 29

Lead me to the river, set me upon an island, and there will I make my home.
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