Make no mistake. Everything in the mind is in rat’s country. It doesn’t die. They are merely carried, these disparate memories, back and forth in the desert of a billion neurons, set down, picked up, and dropped again by mental pack rats. Nothing perishes, it is merely lost till a surgeon’s electrode starts the music of an old player piano whose scrolls are dust. Or you yourself do it, tossing in the restless nights, or even in the day on a strange street when a hurdy-gurdy plays. Nothing is lost, but it can never be again as it was. You will only find the bits and cry out because they were yourself. Nothing can begin again and go right, but still it is you, your mind, picking endlessly over the splintered glass of a mirror dropped and broken long ago. That is all time is at the end when you are old – a splintered glass. I should never have gone to that place, never have accepted the engagement, never have spoken….
~ Loren Eiseley, “The Rat That Danced” from “All the Strange Hours. The Excavation of a Life.”
Image: Broadstreet.com.au via Starwill
