A month’s devotion to art and acculturation, and now I have to study. I’m told I’m intelligent … why is it, then, that I stare at this textbook and feel so cosmically frustrated at my own stupidity?

Because I’ve read this before, years ago, but now I fumble through exercises that were once second nature. Foreign fluencies rust with disuse. A journal entry from four years ago references a Chinese poet I can no longer recite by heart. Every isle of understanding is surrounded by an ocean of oblivion, and the tide is always rising.

And I have an exceptional memory! Does no one else find this so maddeningly torturous? The more I dwell on it, the more primitive human cognition seems to be — hopelessly muddied, laughably narrow, and subject to a thousand petty tyrannies of distortion and decay. I’d hardly even call us an intelligent species.

Times like these I try to cope by reading the champion of cope himself: here is Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense:

Only through forgetfulness could human beings ever entertain the illusion that they possess truth […] Just as it is certain that no leaf is ever exactly the same as any other leaf, it is equally certain that the concept ‘leaf’ is formed by dropping these individual differences arbitrarily, by forgetting those features which differentiate one thing from another, so that the concept then gives rise to the notion that something other than leaves exists in nature, something which would be ‘leaf’, a primal form, say, from which all leaves were woven, drawn, delineated, dyed, curled, painted — but by a clumsy pair of hands, so that no single example turned out to be a faithful, correct, and reliable copy of the primal form.

But right now forgetfulness does not seem to me the hidden quality that enables abstract concept-formation. It is the imperceptible reaper slicing away pieces from me in silence, and its scythe is the Ebbinghaus curve.

Revision, they say. Turn crystal! If I’m truly to learn something, I must commit to refreshing myself on the subject for the rest of my life. But I’ve written before on my foxlike nature; this I cannot do. I’m a roiling cloud of fascinations. I pick things up and understand them quickly; I never understand them long. Everything I’ve done is build castles in the sand.

Why did the angels instantiate me this way? Maybe it amuses them to see the drunkard’s walk. Maybe I’m meant to evince as many short and gasping lifetimes in one. Yesterday I read old journal entries and found myself so foreign in page and preoccupations that I felt autometempsychotic, and wished I had written more if only to trace the travelling soul. Maybe that’s why I feel as though I’m always dying — so that I’m always consumed with the thought of producing something that persists past myself. The thought itself is laughable; whatever the Straussians say, our works will end up scribbles on the refrigerator.

And yet! I have a fierce and mysterious love for old catalogues of belief and inquiry — mythology and folklore, yes, but also the preplatonic metaphysicists, Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. I’ve never been able to explain why it’s so important to me to know whether goat’s blood can soften diamonds, or if magicians ought to be consulted for curing insanity. But it’s very clear to me now. Someone has to remember. Someone has to commiserate. One day that will be us.

And if I were an angel, I’d be a sentimental one. I’d like nothing more than to walk the earth with Aristotle or Anaximander, even lacking the apparatus to glimpse anything but the remotest reaches of truth. It would be a joy to taste that utmost ignorance. It would be a joy to build sandcastles. And it would be a joy to be stupid.

But alright, you caught me — I’ll stop procrastinating, and get back to studying.