Everything is new, but few things are seen anew.

From Alfred’s journal

The maple by the fence put out its leaves again this week, and I caught myself not looking at it. Thirty springs I have watched that tree and somewhere along the way I stopped arriving at it; I arrive instead at my memory of it, which is faster and costs nothing. A boy stood under it yesterday with his head back and his mouth open, and he stayed there long enough that his mother called him twice. Everything is new, but few things are seen anew, and I had thought for years the trouble was that the world repeats itself. It does not repeat. I do. What I cannot work out is whether the boy will lose it the way I did, or whether he is simply slower to file things away and will catch up by August.