I query the “blank slate”, however. It seems to suggest that the only way of getting access to the immediacy of things is to forget all that came before. No one can ever do this, of course. But why is blankness a necessary precondition anyhow? Present experience is always more intense when there’s a frame of reference. When you’re listening attentively to your wife, you’re not listening to the words of a stranger. Her words don’t disappear into thin air, they go to build up your portrait of her as a whole person. They’re not flat, they echo.

That’s true of everyone’s words. You know from many previous posts that I like to quibble and test formulations. Annoying as that may be to you, it’s a thing you know about me and has helped to form your idea of me (along with some pretty distant recollections from high school days). That’s the context permitting you to conclude (I hope) that I’m not just poking a stick in your eye for the sake of meanness.

Until lobotomized or euthanized, each of us holds the world inside himself in the form of a many times scribbled upon slate, not blank since the day we came squawling into the godawful place trying to figure it out.