Sticks and roses

I was browsing through the books of this house, looking for something by Jorge Luis Borges, a very short story about a rose... but instead I found The Marriage of Sticks by the very wonderful Jonathan Carroll.

Anyhoo, so I leafed through, trying to find the original description of 'the marriage of sticks', which is this:

"When anything truly important happens in your life, wherever you happen to be, find a stick in the immediate vicinity and write the occasion and date on it. Keep them together, protect them. There shouldn't be too many; sort through them every few years and separate the events that remain genuinely important from those that were but no longer are. You know the difference. Throw the rest out.

When you are very old, very sick, or sure there's not much time left to live, put them together and burn them. The marriage of sticks."

I thought about the spectrum of people, the endless variation of lives; how some of us might have a zillion thin spindly sticks, and maybe some might have four, or two, or a single stick, solid and strong.

I went and found the rose story, which is called The Rose of Paracelsus, and coincidentally also features burning as a signifier for your life beliefs. But Paracelsus does not gather up the past; he burns not as a retrospective, but a culmination: 'Every step is the goal you seek'. And in Borges's story, the rose does not stay burned.

Which brought me back to those sticks, wondering if they were so finite after all.

Have a great weekend, all X