November in my soul

I was just sitting here wasting time on my computer, and realizing that the crackling from a dying fire in the fireplace is keeping me company.

This reminded me that ages and ages ago, when I was like 12 or something, one of my dictation assignments (my mom and I used to read through the McGuffey readers) was an essay on how to write a letter (thinking now about McGuffey I have a better idea why sometimes I feel so at home with the sentence structure of guys like Jonathan Edwards). One of the suggestions was to burn a candle while you write, because the constant motion of the flame would inspire your own intellectual momentum.

It sounds kind of silly there, but it was written well and convincingly, and it obviously had a great impact on me in the formative years of my life, since it's one of a handful of things I remember from McGuffey's readers.

Just makes me wonder why we remember certain things . . .

After Bible study last Thursday we were talking about childhood memories, and it all made me think that the process of memory seems really circular. Of course so-and-so would remember that, because it captures some huge thing about his personality. But maybe it was the such-and-such that so-and-so remembers that is what made that huge thing about his personality what it is.

What I mean to say is, did that thing about the candle capture my attention because I was already the type of person (at 11, 12, whatever) who likes to write and think and write and think slowly, and who likes to watch fire flicker, and who believes that the flickering of fire inspires deeper thoughts and profounder writings? Or am I the type of person who likes and thinks and believes all that because when I was 11 and 12 I was reading those kinds of books?

I would be more muddled about this except that I read the beginning of Moby Dick once, and all that Melville had to say about the relation between water and thought and desire (". . . as everyone knows, meditation and water are wedded forever."), which has me convinced that water-watchers and flicker-fanciers are born water-watchers and flicker-fanciers.

(That not to say that I won't be reading to my children about water-watching and flicker-fancying, and going to see oceans and lighting candles and bonfires . . . just in case.)