Monday, April 23, 2018

Sometimes I think my brain is empty

I read somewhere that persons in their late eighties are in a mid level beginning stage of mild dementia.  There are enough qualifying words there to soften the blow, I guess.  My husband insists that this is nonsense, that I am sharp as a tack.  Since we have never really made many friends here in Sarasota I have few persons with whom I can test my conversational skills and powers of intellectual invention.  I sit in my readers chair in my bedroom compulsively working my way through the TLS, LRB, Guardian, :Prospect, The New York Review, the New Yorker, and on and on, as well as novels, or books I think I should know about like Comey's memoir or "Fire and Fury", that scandalously crazy account of I guess it is more scandalously crazy life in the West Wing of a few months ago.  The fact of the matter is that I forget almost everything, certainly the details.  That to me smacks of dementia, my husband says no.  He claims that a I try to keep up with so many subjects that there is bound to be massive slippage of detail. Years ago I was driven to write several books about various aspects of classical literature.  Driven is certainly the right word, whatever pleasure I took from the writing, there is no doubt of the compulsion.  I have written a memoir, I wish I could write a novel or rather one that was worth publishing.  I wish I could write something, anything, but in fact I can't hold my subject matter intact enough to form a context. I guess that is a form of letting go which we could call old age.

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