memory

22 years ago I read Walker Percy's Moviegoer and since then I've had an experience with it that I've had with other works, a sense of being a different person. That is: I'm looking back at myself as well as the work as in a kind of mirror. I know myself now and know myself then - simultaneously. The other day when I drew with Cherl's class in High Point I had that experience again - was I once here, but now I am the old hand, the post student, the person who is conversant with how things have worked out.
Now I read Percy and I see the work as a whole rather than a series of episodes. Now I read it with some detachment rather than alongside a schematic of my emotional state. Still I find that I enjoy it more: I read it now, cognizant more about Kierkegaard, having answered questions I had then, and knowing better, as I said, the full scope of the work.
I saw a clip recently of Renais's Last year at Marienbad and that same sense of memory becoming layered obtained. The point of the work, one point that is, is that our lives are always open to interpretation - our word is always penultimate.