An early Facebook engineer tells Mr. Vance, “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.”
I have never honored the dictum "the mind is a muscle." I am forgetting prefixes and words with narrow, specific meanings, like casement (a part of a window set on a hinge so that it opens like a door). The tree, having been trimmed, no longer brushes against the pane of the casement window at night. The window is by my bed; when I can't sleep I roll to open it and breathe the air in. I say, 'I have casement windows; I love my casement windows,' knowing that casement refers to something pleasant about them - something to do with their age? the age of the panes? the proportions and dimensions? the windows are the height of the wall. Not recalling the meaning doesn't bother me; just knowing the word, and that I may apply it here, is enough.
In The Year of Magical Thinking, phrases arise in Didion's mind. She thinks blue-eyed boy Mister Death is E.E. Cummings. She's not sure, but when she looks it up, sees that she is right. I remember And I beneath a deeper sea. I know it's Woolf, but the phrasing is wrong: it's 'rougher' not 'deeper' and 'but' instead of 'and'.
