Recently, Jess has been reading Julia Cameron’s classic The Artist’s Way, and doing the twelve-week program of self-reflection and artistic exploration that it contains.  I had read the book myself, and done the program, back in 2001 or 2002.  But listening to Jess discuss her current experience with it, I realized that I no longer really remembered any of the book, at all.  I knew that I had picked up my longstanding Morning Pages habit from the program – three daily pages of free-write brain-dump journaling (though I’d since given up on the hand-written approach Cameron prescribes, defaulting to 750 typed words daily instead, for the sake of time).  Otherwise, though, not a clue.  So, I started re-reading the book myself.  And, honestly, I haven’t even really felt glimmers of remembrance or recognition; it’s like I’d never even read the book at all.

Recently, I was revising my long-term goals (including creating new 25-year ones that will carry me all the way to 65), and I spent some time thinking about books, along with plays and movies.  I first came up with some ways of trying to keep up with the best of the new releases in the years to come.  But then I decided I should maybe try to pull together a ‘cultural literacy list’ of all the older books and plays and movies that I’d never read but long meant to.  Starting with a slew of critics’ picks, the winners of various awards, and other people’s attempts at the same kind of list-making, I was able to concatenate a list I can then try to chip away at in the years ahead.

The resultant catalog is excellent for soothing the completist, OCD part of my brain: if I can just read and watch my way through, I’ll be ‘done!’  But my experience with The Artist’s Way, and several similar ones of late, has given me pause.  Recent conversations about movies I watched decades back, like Jurassic Park or Indiana Jones, made clear that I now only remember random snippets and iconic scenes, without more than a vague sense of their plots overall.  Or earlier this year, I re-read Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, and though there I did at least have rough memories of most of the anecdotes, it turned out I remembered only the contours (something with a racially-motivated police shooting in the Bronx?) and almost none of the useful detail or lessons Gladwell drew from them.

All of which is to say, even if I do manage to slog my way through my entire cultural literacy list, I’m not sure that will be much of an achievement.  Instead, I’ll just have to head back to the start, and begin going through it all again, as by then I’m sure I’ll have forgotten pretty much everything from my first pass.