Memories

Every day, I publish another post and exhaust another subject. Every day there are more posts. Every day it grows harder to be certain I have not covered a subject in the past, and making matters worse is my poor ability to organize those posts in such a way that I can find the original post if I suspect one exists. There is nothing to depend on but my shoddy memory. I think that I have so far managed to not duplicate in its entirety anything so far. I have sometimes expanded on things previously written of only in passing, but how long can I keep that up?

This is not the only thing to make me fret about that. I have read this thing which states that our capacity for remembering is deteriorating as we punt that responsibility to the comprehensive knowledge of the internet. I have resolved to do my utmost to remember things all by myself whenever it is of little enough urgency that the time can be spared in the recalling. As I write this, I am desperately racking my brain to conjure up the title of a book I recently read. I know the author, the plot, the characters and other works by that author, but the name escapes me. I am refusing any and all aid.

It is alarming to think that I am at the peak of my abilities not just physically but mentally. I have many years ahead of me to learn, but the time will come when my capacity to learn is no longer a match for slowed wits and increased rate of forgetting. Perhaps I will then still be able to mask the degradation, but I'm sure I will be cognizant of it. I only hope that, as with the loss of hair that I anticipate, I manage to deal with it maturely and gracefully.

Then again, I am maybe too hasty in discounting the possibility of an upside here. Even at this period of relative youth, there are plenty of things which I wish I could forget. It is unfortunate that the mental feebleness to come can't focus on that which I would benefit from losing, but maybe I will get lucky and it will get more of the bad things than not. After all, that's essentially the strategy of chemotherapy and radiation, which I understand to be tolerably effective in eradicating the cancer from many.