Chores, Secrets, Memory

A quiet, meditative morning, passed mostly tending to household chores.

Afternoon. A walk in the sun. On his hands and knees, the almost-eighty-seven-year-old woodcutter was pulling his neighbor’s weeds.

The Rambler, Numb. 14. Tuesday, May 1, 1750. Secrets — to tell, or not to tell.

The rules therefore that I shall propose concerning secrecy, and from which I think it not safe to deviate, without long and exact deliberation, are — Never to solicit the knowledge of a secret. Not willingly, not without many limitations, to accept such confidence when it is offered. When a secret is once admitted, to consider the trust as of a very high nature, important as society, and sacred as truth, and therefore not to be violated for any incidental convenience, or slight appearance of contrary fitness.

Read the sixty-first chapter of Middlemarch.

The terror of being judged sharpens the memory: it sends an inevitable glare over that long-unvisited past which has been habitually recalled only in general phrases. Even without memory, the life is bound into one by a zone of dependence in growth and decay; but intense memory forces a man to own his blameworthy past. With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man’s past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.

October 17, 2023.

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