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Wed 28 Nov 2001 by mskala Tags used: nov01It's not the same when you go back but you do too have to go back, that is the law, the closure of the set. Wherever you draw the line of your path, there'll be those places in the margin. You see the surfaces as you pass, you infer what's behind them, and some day before you leave you must stop and take a look, fix the images in your mind because it won't be the same and even the first time it isn't how you imagined, always a surprise as that is information, I told you before: it's not what you imagined even the first time, and the second time you don't see what you thought you remembered the first time.
It's like being quoted in the newspaper, you always come through sounding like rather more of a dumbass than you remember in the interview, and what are you going to do about it? Eventually you'll learn to draw your lines for what to worry about and what not to worry about too, and you'll learn not to worry too hard about things like that, the second time isn't as bad as the first but it never feels normal. You never reach the point where others are seeing the image you remembered of yourself, any more than those roads are quite what the images in your head say they should be. You can't fix them because they're not broken; it's your expectations that are broken.
Expectation is defined as the integral of the variable times its probability density function. Depending on the shape of the curve, the density at the actual exact expected value may well be small or zero. Don't expect the expected value.
It's only later that you'll remember those places you meant to go back to, too late for you to do it now, you didn't put them on the list early enough. If you've lead a good life then by that time you'll have found new roads to walk and new surfaces to skate your eyes across; you may draw a line through the list, erase the slate and start again. It's the line of life, coiled up in your hand, and you can't break it even if you wanted to because it's a fixed thing, bigger than you in every possible dimension.
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