Unbelievably nice weather. In the 70’s at least. Feels like summer in Oregon: probably because everything is still green.

I was reminded today of an afternoon during my junior year at Lewis & Clark. I suppose this entry should go under that date, if I could remember it. Or perhaps not: I am remembering it now, through the filters of almost four years. Three years. I lose track. (I wanted to live in Boston or Portland another year, I forget which.) It’s probably late April of 1998 that I remember, and during the reading week between classes and finals.

It’s one of those days that in retrospect (everything is in retrospect–even this sentence in which I am realizing it–except action, and even that is slowly eaten away by time and memory…) is both unimportant and absolutely critical. I owe my self to that day, to myself of three unburied years; equally there might have been some other day when it might have happened–history is full of “important” dates and events that were just crystallizations of sentiments that were growing and that grew apart from the figures we name in our books as “critical players”. Science calls it a stochastic process: an irreversible change that has a random chance of occurring at any given time. Given enough time it will happen somewhere or another, and the system will never be the same.

I am not getting around to my point, which illustrates quite nicely the danger of recollection. By now this memory is so full of interpretation that the event itself is almost an afterthought. The silent artillery of time, Lincoln (I believe) said. So for what it’s worth:

Sick of the words and symbols that had filled the pages of his notes and textbooks and sick of the words that filled his head (as they still do) and that had been useless and unable to speak when she was looking at him, he abandoned his studies and took a small book and a bottle of water on a walk. Later this walk up in the western hills of Portland would appear to him in a dream so strange that even when he scribbled it down on three sheets of paper it still held a little bit of its sublimity. The book was a terrible choice; not so terrible as The Flies by Jean-Paul Sartre, but a book about another young man, this time in Moscow, whose words were likewise insufficient. He walked north along this road under a brutally lovely blue sky, this road that twisted itself along the contours of the hills, hiding and then revealing the city in the vague distance. Joggers walked by, cars drove by, and it may even be that airplanes flew overhead. The precise forms are inessential here, though: it was then that he realized for the first time that none of these things need have the names given them, or the explanations attached to those names; the joggers, for instance, may well have been running away from something terrible, and the drivers in their cars may well have been trapped inside them, carried around the city by programmed means and ends beyond their control.

At once he felt an incredible heaviness at his back and a lightness under his feet.