{"id":93284,"date":"2016-01-07T15:31:07","date_gmt":"2016-01-07T20:31:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=93284"},"modified":"2016-01-07T15:43:31","modified_gmt":"2016-01-07T20:43:31","slug":"existence-precedes-essence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/01\/07\/existence-precedes-essence\/","title":{"rendered":"Existence Precedes Essence"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Uh …<\/p><\/div>\n

I lost an idea last night. It was late, and I was tired, and I had some kind of insight that seemed interesting\u2014but, with hubris worthy of a Greek tragedy, I told myself I\u2019d remember in the morning. Of course, I didn\u2019t. All I remembered was the lightbulb moment, which, with each passing hour, became more dazzling, more revelatory, more important in my memory. Within a few hours of my forgetting it, this had become the best idea I\u2019d ever had.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I tried to retrace my steps. I looked at everything I\u2019d read before bed: a book on the existentialists, a volume of the\u00a0Betsy-Tacy\u00a0series, an aging\u00a0New Yorker<\/em>\u00a0piece. None prompted any recollection, so I returned to the crossword I\u2019d been working, the frankly insulting Pandora station I\u2019d been listening to, and the series of YouTube videos my husband and I had watched before bed: a Neil Diamond concert film and the 2002 UK novelty hit \u201cThe Cheeky Song (Touch My Bum)<\/a>.\u201d Both of these masterworks had prompted deep online research, of course, s0 I vanished again into those rabbit holes, too.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Still nothing. Perhaps I\u2019m just getting older. Normally I welcome any sign of aging: with a gray hair or a slight diminution of flexibility comes the sense that precocity, or the expectation of energetic achievement, is slipping ever farther out of reach. A great relief. But somehow one still imagines\u00a0oneself<\/em>\u00a0inside a slightly older body, and I am coming to see that that, too, is the arrogance of youth.<\/p>\n

Or maybe it\u2019s the sleeping pills.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s that wonderful part in The Shop Around the Corner<\/em> where Jimmy Stewart\u2019s character talks about the glories of uncertainty. \u201cDid you ever get a bonus?\u201d he asks his colleague.\u00a0\u201cThe boss hands you the envelope. You wonder how much is in it, and you don\u2019t want to open it. As long as the envelope\u2019s closed, you\u2019re a millionaire.\u201d<\/p>\n

A lost suitcase; a careless housekeeper; a mind that did something special, one time, that would have changed everything. But I was too busy thinking what \u201cTouch My Bum\u201d might have sounded like, as covered by Neil Diamond. (Strangely perfect.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sadie Stein is contributing editor of <\/em>The Paris Review, and the <\/em>Daily\u2019s correspondent<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I lost an idea last night. It was late, and I was tired, and I had some kind of insight that seemed interesting\u2014but, with hubris worthy of a Greek tragedy, I told myself I\u2019d remember in the morning. Of course, I didn\u2019t. All I remembered was the lightbulb moment, which, with each passing hour, became […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13115],"tags":[8769,9111,15218,915,6976,163,17202],"class_list":["post-93284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-daily-correspondent","tag-aging","tag-existentialism","tag-forgetfulness","tag-hubris","tag-jimmy-stewart","tag-memory","tag-neil-diamond"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nI Lost an Idea Last Night<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"On Forgetting Your Genius Idea\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/01\/07\/existence-precedes-essence\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Existence Precedes Essence by Sadie Stein\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"January 7, 2016 \u2013 I lost an idea last night. 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