04 March 2010

a nice sensation:

today was my first day of work. this evening, i biked down the street to waterloo icehouse to visit bradley and drink a cold shiner bock; there i was, relaxing and reading a book from the library, when i came across this passage:
There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting. Consider this utterly commonplace situation: a man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down. Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time.
In existential mathematics, that experience takes the form of two basic equations: the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting. 
as i unconsciously dog-eared the page, i was surprised at how smoothly and easily it bent under my index finger; the words must have similarly struck at least a half-dozen readers before me.

1 comment:

camille said...

i have been in a reading lull lately, but this demonstration of the magic of literature has me tingling with anticipation of my next adventure.

thanks, whit.