Recollecting Recounting

Stop me if you have heard this one before.

How comes it that our memories are good enough to retain even the minutest details of what has befallen us, but not to recollect how many times we have recounted them to the same person?

from La Rochefoucauld Maxims translated by Leonard Tancock.

Shinkichi Takahashi has a splendid epithet in one of his Zen poems which reminds me so much of the brittle wit of La Rochefoucauld: "the moralist's porcelain nobility".

Some may call it deception, evasion, / Others scorn it as the moralist's porcelain nobility

And so for day 1481
02.01.2011