usable pasts

one thousand blogposts. it would be cool to make a chart or map or diagram of them all.

I found these old sketches last week in old notebooks. the old notebooks will help me (presumably) study for prelims over the next six weeks.

the sketches are pretty much just there. not relevant to studying at all, really. I took photos of them and have thereby transferred some of their inky randomness onto the internet. I think they were drawn sometime late in 2013.

I keep coming across this phrase, "a usable past," in academic books, mainly, where authors use it to hedge around the reality that the true past is and ever will be inaccessible. our biases will always cloud our memories--personal and cultural. the biases of past peoples don't exactly help clarify reality for us either.

I wonder in another thousand blogposts how I will look back and read the things I'm writing here. already the ten years of this blog stretch off into foggy, familiar, fuzzy, foreign places. are they usable, now? will they be usable still in ten more years?

probably to someone. but it's hard to say what for...