Sixty-one

I wrote, in an earlier post, that I’ve always thought of myself and my relation to the world as that of microcosm to macrocosm. But that’s not a thought. It’s too simple, too crude to be called a thought. It’s no more than the preparation for a thought, establishing its parameters. I haven’t had a real thought in years, decades. Not since I was a child.

I put away childish things, stopped playing games, including intellectual games, early and went to work. Serious work, men’s work. Doing what I had to do, not what I knew I should do if my life was to have any meaning, any value. Most men do what they have to do in order to survive, not what they should do.

Now I’m retired. I used to tell myself that, when I retired and no longer had to waste my time working, I would finally have time to think.

I have the time now, but I no longer have the mind.

I go through my papers, reading things I wrote half a century ago, and I’m in awe of the mind that thought and wrote these things, the person I used to be. Now when I try to think, I’m only plagiarizing that person, and not even saying the same things as well as he did.

I would have to begin again, from the beginning. But I don’t have the time.