It is terrible to read yesterday’s notes hastily. This disregard has a monstrous and endless appetite. The first time you feed it, you might have a notion that today’s thought is better than yesterday’s. Maybe you recall that you were overcaffeinated when you wrote that. Fine, but then what. It is a pump that feeds its own intake, ever darkening the product. The analyst who skims the manual every time and never finds the answer. Yesterday’s self becomes ever dumber. Soon you are skimming Anne Carson, Cormac McCarthy, and Wallace Stevens, wondering why you used to feel a connection. A friend recently told me that he combats hedonic adaptation by wanting what he has, and, of course, if I repeat that mantra to myself every day for a month, as I, a fetishizer of catechesis, am wont to do, I will feel a loss of meaning in it also.
The pattern is this
1. repulsion →
2. interest →
3. attraction →
4. habituation, excitement →
5. habituation, familiarity →
6. habituation, repulsion →
7. habituation, acceptance
And I usually stop at the sixth step.
This sixth step branches this way: reading yesterday’s notes hastily, and then not reading them, and then not writing them, and then wondering why I bought the notebook. This is the progression of embitterment.
So do what instead? The Jurist Learned Hand said,
“There is no surer way to misread any document than to read it literally. … As nearly as we can, we must put ourselves in the place of those who uttered the words, and try to divine how they would have dealt with the unforeseen situation; and, although their words are by far the most decisive evidence of what they would have done, they are by no means final.”
So we have to do that with ourselves. What were we thinking? What were we trying to say? How can we carry that forward?