Cycle/recycle

Do the workings of the human mind have natural cycles?

If we read Ulysses in our early twenties, are we likely to remember it later, or are we condemned to an impressionistic view of how the novel feels rather than what it actually says?

I suppose this is natural for reading memory.

Having read Ulysses in my early twenties, I have no choice but to read it again now, in my early thirties, if I am to recover my prior thoughts on the text, or if I am able to remember Ulysses at all.

Outside of the book, life sifts through the hourglass. The mind develops or evolves - depending on which model of mental progress you subscribe to - and with it your receptivity to the text. Ulysses will be different now than it was then, insofar as mental development or evolution allows. Some would say this is maturing with the text. As I walk the streets, I carry Ulysses around with me in spirit, conjuring up images of its printed pages as if evoking its iconoclastic spirit. What I am invoking here is my attachment to the written word, which has always been the dominant influence on my own self-formation. My affinity with the written word or language in general, in fact, is thickening at a rate I myself am not determining. Is this another natural cycle?

Things are falling into place. At last! I think I understand what is meant by the materiality of the word! I'm still not sure whether I ultimately understand what is meant by this, other than some nebulous sense of the word as a shape-shifting, vocalisable element in the toolbox of the intellect. In any case, for me the materiality of the word has something to do with that feeling of individual words forming in my head, revolving in order to reveal meaning on the other side. And all further revolutions of this word will uncover other meanings. No two sides are the same, or so the mind thinks.

Perhaps I'm not making myself clear. Such is language.

So: three years? Five years? Ten?

Duration is subjective. It can be the mother of all invention, allowing for the entrance of the Muse. The flip side is an ineluctable erosion of the mind. Perhaps the two are neutralising; the Muse comes forth because mental erosion clears memory space. Or stuff gets buried in the ever deepening pile of the palimpsest.