The Personal is Political. The Political is Personal.

 
can't remember why I wanted to post this

Wordsworth says that the secret to inner beauty is having a rotten memory:

What if I floated down a pleasant stream,
And now am landed, and the motion gone,
Shall I reprove myself? Ah no, the stream
Is flowing, and will never cease to flow,
And I shall float upon that stream again.
By such forgetfulness the soul becomes,
Words cannot say how beautiful.

I like to think that he means something more here than just the relatively trite (by today's modernistic, Buddhism-via-Beatniks-via-EST standards) maxim that, "To live in the moment, you've got to let go of the past." I wonder what it looks like to say that, the more beautiful you are, the more erased you are. I love that he (who is "so good with words") literally "cannot say" what the payoff is; the reward for a blank behind us is the promise of a blank ahead of us.

The internet is a very ugly invention in that it never forgets anything.
posted by TiR at 6:35 PM