At the end of my shelves of diaries, I keep a little “on this date” stack, and when I have an idle moment or I’m out of ideas, I’ll flip through the stack and see what else I was doing on today’s date.

I do not recommend this practice if you would prefer to think of time as linear, instead of circular. Over and over again, I find old versions of me feeling the same feelings that I’m feeling now and hearing weird echoes of the present in the pages of the past. Some people might find this depressing, but I find it comforting. The sense that I’ve been here before and maybe, if I’m lucky, I’ll be here again.

Just now, flipping through my 2018 diary, I found this entry from September 10th, 2018:

There’s a part in Duncan Hannah’s diary when David Hockney points at a contemporary painting and says, “If art really progressed, then that would be better than a Caravaggio. David Byrne (also once an art student) has said the same— “Presuming that there is such a thing as ‘progress’ when it comes to music… is typical of the high self-regard of those who live in the present.” Linear progress. Abandon the notion. More like a spiral.

Abe Lincoln once said, “Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new at all.”

My notebooks serve to show me just how old my ideas actually are!

And all that’s fine, whatever, but Meg thought it read cleaner and faster this way.

“Good cut,” I told her, “I’ll put it on my blog, instead.”

Relocate your darlings!