“It seemed as if I had already shed the skin of those days.”

I was reading Patti Smith’s “Year of the Monkey”, and I stopped and reread and then repeated this sentence to myself. I find the phrase comforting, this idea of shedding skin of the days past. All of a sudden, it makes sense. That’s how the world works. That’s how I work.

I had already shed the skin of those days. It’s that easy. Or not easy, but it happens. You don’t stay in that same skin that you were wearing ten years ago. Things get lost, people can, too — this is also part of the old skin of you that has to go. You shed that skin and grow a new one. You change, things change. No need to carry your old self, your old habits just because they were there at some point. You don’t even owe anything to the person you once were. You don’t need to carry the old skin around with you.

This is a very casual and at the same time celebratory sentence. With a hint of nostalgia, but without bitterness. It is just so. As I read it, I looked outside the window of S-Bahn, at the autumn trees changing color, and shedding their leaves. Symmetrical to the thought.

***

One more thought as I read the book.

When people read and highlight things on Kindle, it shows most popular highlights. All of them are the things that are “universal”. Things that go beyond the story, beyond the book. Things that can be taken and transported to some kind of “universal truth”, an interesting observation of its own.

What goes unnoticed most of the time are the things that are specific to the book, things beyond generalizations and pretense of a broader truth.

Commonly highlighted in “Year of the Monkey”:

The trouble with dreaming, I was thinking, is that one can be drawn into a mystery that is no mystery at all, occasioning absurd observations and discourse leading to not a single reality-based conclusion.

Not commonly highlighted:

I thought him arrogant, though in an appealing way, but his suggestion that I should front a rock band, though improbable, was also intriguing. At the time, I was seeing Sam Shepard and I told him what Sandy had said. Sam just looked at me intently and told me I could do anything. We were all young then, and that was the general idea. That we could do anything.

This latter quote provides, I think, a better insight into Patti Smith’s writing. It is the book’s better representation. Even though it actually has the words “the general idea”, it is more people-and-situation-specific. Very characteristic of Smith and Shepard and their “zeitgeist”.