<p>Good quotes found in an old journal, from the profound to the profane:</p>
<p class="quote">Can the meaning of a precise moment appear all at once? It need hardly be pointed out: only the succession of moments can become clear. One moment has meaning only in its relation to other moments. We are at each instant only fragments deprived of meaning if we do not relate these fragments to other fragments. How can we refer to this completed whole? <br>Georges Bataille, <em>The Tears of Eros</em>
<p class="quote">Emerging from /an Abyss and /entering it again /that is life /is it not? <br>Emily Dickinson</p>
<p class="quote">Hang a guitar on any ugly, stupid bastard and <em>someone</em> will want to fuck him. (This from someone who would know&mdash;but not because he was ugly or stupid.)</p>
<p class="quote">When you are ready to accept things as they are, you will receive them as old friends, even though you appreciate them with new feeling.<br>Shunryu Suzuki, <em>Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind</em></p>
<p class="quote">Memory's truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also, but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.<br> Salman Rushdie, <em>Midnight's Children</em></p>
<p class="quote">Vast emptiness and nothing holy in it. (No attribution recorded, but I think it was Kerouac or another Beat writer.)**</p>
<p class="quote">Don't mistake a delay for a defeat. (From a horoscope.)</p>
<p class="quote">Trails are like that: You're floating along in a Shakespearean Arden paradise and expect to see nymphs and fluteboys, then suddenly you're struggling in a hot broiling sun of hell in dust and nettles and poison oak... just like life. <br>Jack Kerouac, <em>The Dharma Bums</em></p>
<p>One task I've set for myself this summer is going through boxes and boxes of (what I suspect is) junk and getting rid of as much of it as possible. While I find this task daunting, even depressing, it offers a certain degree of enjoyment, since many of the boxes are filled with my life's ephemera: photos, postcards, concert tickets, letters (yes, I used to send and receive them), buttons ("I won't respect you in the morning either"), articles cut out of magazines ("In My Life: An R.E.M. Discography"), nametags from conferences, old journals. Looking through the old journals, I find the quotations I've noted far more interesting than what I wrote (about) myself. I'm glad to have the rambling, ranting, emoting&mdash;and most interesting, but most infrequent, chronicles of events&mdash;recorded there, but my own words don't speak to me now, while the words of Dickinson, Kerouac, Batailles*, even the horoscope writer, do. So I'm glad I wrote that stuff in there, too.</p>
<p>In spite of having found so far mostly things that I don't want to throw out, I've managed to get rid of several bags of (mostly) paper. Today's batch of boxes yielded my collection of cassette tapes. These tapes pose something of a dilemma, since I don't necessarily want to get rid of them, but I don't necessarily have any use for them, either&mdash;we don't even have the tape deck hooked up to the stereo any more. Some of them are keepers merely because they are out of print and would likely be difficult to replace (I'm talking to you <em>The Sound of Music</em> by <a href="http://www.thedbs.com" target="blank">The dB's</a>). Others that I don't want to part with are mix tapes lovingly crafted by various music fanboys of my acquaintance. The tapes that can go&mdash;the ones that should probably have gone in the trash today&mdash;are tapes made of records or cds just so I could listen to them in the car (or just so I could listen to them, since the originals belonged to someone else). For some reason dumping these cassettes in the trash seems wrong&mdash;like throwing away a book. I must get over it. Hanging on to three boxes of cassettes is just ridiculous. I found a boom box  in the basement (I wasn't sure that we still had one) and brought it up so I could listen to R.E.M.'s <em>Fables of the Reconstruction</em>, which I hadn't heard in years&mdash;because I have it only on cassette! Need to rectify that. </p>
<p class="note">*Especially the Bataille. There were several quotes from <em>The Tears of Eros</em> that make me want to read that again (since I remember nothing about the book, not even having read it&mdash;this is the reason I now keep lists of books I read).</p>
<p class="note">**<strong>Addendum:</strong> Perhaps this was quoted by a Beat writer. It turns out it is a quotation from the founder of Zen Buddhism.</p>