Rebecca Solnit, one of today's great thinkers, wrote recently in her book A Field Guide to Getting Lost:
It is in the nature of things to be lost and not otherwise. Think of how little has been salvaged from the compost of time of the hundreds of billions of dreams dreamt since the language to describe them emerged, how few names, how few wishes, how few languages even, how we don't know what tongues the people who erected the standing stones of Britain and Ireland spoke or what the stones meant, don't know much of the language of the Gabrielanos of Los Angeles or the Miwoks of Marin, don't know how or why they drew the giant pictures on the desert floor in Nazca, Perus, don't know much even about Shakespeare or Li Po. It is as though we make the exception the rule, believe that we should have rather than that we will generally lose.
True, but it's a problem for which the great bard of the radio, Jean Shepherd, had a solution. As recounted on Prof. Al Filreis's poetry site, it's a Dream Collection Day:
A way to recycle dreams, to keep them alive...beautiful.
