Can you rework your past, the grit that rubs in you, until it is shiny and smooth as a pearl?

The cynic sees only cynicism, the depressive can taint creation with one glance

one does not remember one’s own pain. It is the suffering of others that undoes us

I am a woman on her way to eat cake.

Can you rework your past, the grit that rubs in you, until it is shiny and smooth as a pearl?

Memory, like so much else, is unreliable. Not only for what it hides and what it alters, but also for what it reveals.

I remember learning German - so beautiful, so strange - at school in Australia on the other side of the earth. My family was nonplussed about me learning such an odd, ugly language and, though of course too sophisticated to say it, the language of the enemy. But I liked the sticklebrick nature of it, building long supple words by putting short ones together. Things could be brought into being that had no name in English - Weltanschauung, Schadenfreude, sippenhaft, Sonderweg, Scheissfreundlichkeit, Vergangenheitsbewältigung.