Mick and Keith and Thomas

[Monte Davis]

MB >a building up of a body of knowledge and associations within one's mind,
like a friendship growing fractally over time...

There you go again, hinting at the elephant in the room: that we're
just-so-many years older than when we first read any touchstone book of our
lives. Not everyone cultivates the fractals: sometimes "Pynchon hasn't done
anything that good since" says little more than "Damn, I wish a new book
would thrill me the way GR did back in the day."

Listen to Enzian: "A former self is a fool, an insufferable ass, but he's
still human, you'd no more turn him out than you'd turn out any other kind
of cripple, would you?"

Or to Margarita in David Mitchell's "Ghostwritten":
 
"You asked, would I like to change places with those kids? It would be nice
to steal their twenties off them, sure, if I could transmigrate into them
with my present mind intact, but otherwise I'd rather change places with a
terrier in the zoo."