I was listening to a book on tape while driving and when the author said, “Those days I delighted in everything,” I pulled over and found a pencil and a parking ticket stub because surely there was a passage of life where I thought “These days I delight in everything,” right there in the present, because they almost all feel like that now, memory having markered only the outline while evaporating the inner anxieties of earlier times. Did I not disparage my body for years on end, for instance, although, in contrast that younger one now strikes me as near-Olympian? And the crushing preoccupations of that same younger self might seem magically diluted, as though a dictator in hindsight, had only been an overboard character — but not so. Where went the fear, dense as the sudden dark in the woods, of being alone, or the bruise of 3:30 pm in a silent apartment, when the disenfranchised live only with the sunlight through the blinds, just pr...
