Of angels, St Thomas writes that their knowledge is always actualized, whereas “Human minds are potentially knowledgeable before they acquire knowledge and then potentially knowing when not attending to the knowledge they have acquired” (Ia 58). The truth of this latter proposition becomes eminently clear when opening boxes that have sat undisturbed for years while the mind that filled them was attending to other things. In one box, nestled in a mouse-nest lining of concert, train, and airline tickets, I find a yearbook from Lewis & Clark. All the people I’ve forgotten, but whose pictures evoke the most precise and detailed memories (I see Liza Reitz, concertmaster of the orchestra, tall, unbelievably talented and lovely, smiling as she puts her violin away while I tie my tongue in knots trying to introduce myself to her).

Also nestled there, hundreds of pages of manuscripts for stories and poems, none of which earlier today I could have recalled. Reading them I remember what it was like to be the person who wrote them. What a strange mixture of unsteady emotion I was! So many unfinished thoughts. I wanted to be an artist, but an artist’s job is to feel things first, and I didn’t trust my own emotions. Still, some of my flights, seen from what is undoubtedly a much firmer place, astonish me, and I find it strange to think that the person who wrote all that is somehow me.

But of course these animals survive, and grow. I couldn’t have played Shostakovitch’s 9th Symphony last weekend if they hadn’t.

(cdm | LostInTheMemoryPalace)