William Maxwell’s novel So Long, See You Tomorrow has this passage about a boy who moves with his mother after a divorce snuggled inside of it: 

“Having taken away the dog, take away the kitchen—the smell of something good in the oven for dinner. Also the smell of wash-day, of wool drying on the wooden rack. Take away the early-morning mist, the sound of crows quarreling in the treetops. …

“His work clothes are still hanging on a nail beside the door of his room, but nobody puts them on or takes them off. Nobody sleeps in his bed. Or reads the broken-backed copy of Tom Swift and His Flying Machine. Take that away too while you’re at it.

“Take away the horse barn too—the smell of hay and dust and horse piss and old sweat-stained leather, and the rain beating down on the plowed field beyond the open door. … Take all this away and what have you done to him? In the face of a deprivation so great, what is the use of asking him to go on being the boy he was. He might as well start life over again as some other boy instead.” Pgs 112-113

Okay—you’ve caught me! Perhaps I’m whimpering again. Do other people see their lives as a palimpsest or an onion skin that you can see through obliquely to the lower levels? Who am I, I wonder, when it seems that I’ve lived five different lives? Have been five different boys. What does it mean that the only real consistency is that I have a sick fondness for bad Paul McCartney records. 

The liturgical rites of the Roman Catholic church have always impressed me because of their sameness through time and geography (the same rites having been celebrated in the past and on different continents). They call it the communion of saints, and not just of those on this earth, but also those that have passed to heaven, who also, I imagine (but don’t quote me since I am not a Catholic theologian), celebrate the same mass in the afterlife. What an invention! Especially when it seems impossible to get a man or a woman to not change their mind about something.