{"id":20006,"date":"2018-06-03T19:40:23","date_gmt":"2018-06-04T00:40:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=20006"},"modified":"2018-06-03T19:40:23","modified_gmt":"2018-06-04T00:40:23","slug":"this-montaigne-is-aging-nicely","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2018\/06\/03\/this-montaigne-is-aging-nicely\/","title":{"rendered":"This Montaigne Is Aging Nicely"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve reached an age where decades are a drop in the sink beneath the mirror in which my face suddenly sags. You know, a couple years ago (six being “a couple,” where ten is “a few”), I started a category on this blog called DeRooneyfication<\/a>, which covers projects I’ve completed after the passage of time. It’s not a very big category, sadly, as so many projects remain incomplete.<\/p>\n

But what’s rather striking to me today is the copy of Montaigne’s essays atop my dresser.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

You know when I set it there?<\/p>\n

I carried that book on one of my trips to Kansas City<\/a> the beginning of last summer. I read a couple of the essays in the beginning, and then I laid the book aside for later reading.<\/p>\n

And a year has passed. I’ve moved the book to dust (infrequently), but it’s been atop my dresser for a full year. It sits there with the rotating cast of carry books that I put in my gym bag when I make my (infrequent) trips to the martial arts school, (weekly, mostly) trips to church where I can read the book over the Sunday School hour, or to various sports practices where I sit in the bleachers while my child or children run around. A book of poems that I take out to read on the deck sometimes at night joins the stack. But the Montaigne? That’s been a year<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I don’t know what it says that books that I pluck from my shelves to read sometime languish on side tables or dressers for years<\/em> before I pick them back up or, in a fit of cleansing, put them back on the to-read shelves. But a year<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The vertigo of passing time that I get from these realizations might explain why I don’t open my nightstand drawer. Within it, a couple of poetry books I started to read to my children when they were very young, when I would read poetry to them while they played their toddler games, reside. Pablo Neruda and Ogden Nash en media res. I haven’t lived in this house for a decade (yet), but these books might make it a decade in the nightstand before I find them or before an estate sale appraiser looks them over and marks them fifty cents.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve reached an age where decades are a drop in the sink beneath the mirror in which my face suddenly sags. You know, a couple years ago (six being “a couple,” where ten is “a few”), I started a category on this blog called DeRooneyfication, which covers projects I’ve completed after the passage of time. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20006","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20006","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20006"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20006\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20008,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20006\/revisions\/20008"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20006"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}