Unpacking boxes to move

Looking through an old notebook, I come across two sayings attributable to Pyrrho of Elis (c. 360-275 B.C.) "Nothing really exists, but human life is governed by convention" and, "Nothing is in itself more this than that."

What's most interesting in Trollope, other than his prescient depiction of Donald Trump, a sham businessman with political pretensions who's at least honest enough to kill himself one hundred pages before the books' conclusion, is Trollope's depiction of writers as only being serious enough about writing in order to be thought of by others as writers, understanding almost nothing of their own lives themselves and rendering only what they understand, solely to have it published in order to see their names in print.

This moving from one house to another is a strange business. I'm unpacking boxes as much as I'm packing them; unpacking, I decide what to keep  and what to throw away, looking through old notebooks and manuscripts with my name on them as if they were written by someone else, someone who isn't me, then throwing things into the fire.