We can reflect on our experiences and share the insights with others. My grandfather lives in the new age. My grandson will still live in the old. New meat is eaten with old forks. From the new antennae come the old stupidities.
Wisdom is passed from mouth to mouth.
It has often seemed to me that in the poems I most fancy, every word has hanging on it scores of remembrances, like pots and pans dangling from a prairie schooner trekking westward. The poet's yearning to haul to the surface those reverberations from the past is a yearning I share. My own puny, failed, and always furtive efforts to write poetry are in response to distant voices in my head. One belongs to my grandfather Joseph, who died when I was five. How long I have wished to unwrap from the enigma of that cold, waxen corpse the person I yearned as a child to know.