feeling, as I fear,
The weakness of a human love for days
Disowned by memory.
--William Wordsworth
When everything else has gone from my brain--the President’s name, the state capitals, the neighborhood where I lived, and then my own name and what it was on earth I sought, and then at length the faces of my friends, and finally the faces of my family--when all this has dissolved, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that.
--Annie Dillard, An American Childhood