Kacee Copus’s Reviews > What We Can Know > Status Update

He was relaxed giving instructions to workmen and shopkeepers, but he was uneasy when he had to be on the level with people without formal education. He did not know what terms of reference he should be using. Or it was simply contempt, or a little of both.

I use the journals mostly to remind myself of the sequence of events, in which memory is notoriously weak. The past, jumbled in the mind, survives its own special tense, a form of ahistorical present.

A journal, whatever its quality, fixes events like beads on a string.

This is the feeling I’m attempting to describe. The waiting figure on the modern bridge is me. The collapsed bridge down-stream and the man crossing it a hundred years before represents the past from which I too am excluded, the past that from here seems whole and precious, when many of humanity’s problems could have been solved.

“Poetry had a lowering effect on him. Classical music too. Their cultural weight and solemnity and self-importance oppressed him. He suspected that people were subtly bullied into faking appreciation in order not to appear uneducated fools.”