Depth versus Breadth

Each year was like that, eventful and full of changes, although the classrooms in the many various schools I went to were more similar than one might expect, with their blackboards and various vintages of desks, and friezes of capital and small letters on green lined cardboard around the top of the room. When I was eighteen, my courses at the university were required to fulfill both Depth (major field of study) and Breadth (liberal arts) requirements. The story I told the historian on Thanksgiving when I was eighteen was the whole sprawling summary, in which the details in depth are lost. But the changes were regular and rhythmic enough to hang a great deal of memory from.

So I could list the houses I lived in, or the schools I went to, like the warp threads strung on the loom of memory; and then find more events associated with those places, in fractal detail, as I consider each trivial item. As the shuttle passes across the established width of the weaving, it carries the weft threads which each contribute another line of pattern.