for future reference
It should have been easy to go through (or to start to go through) the digital photographs and discard the least interesting of countless pictures of stacks of books (how many could one possibly need?) or the out-of-focus and ill-composed images of people whose names I have forgotten. I will admit I was anticipating folder after folder of autumn leaves and frost at a narrow depth of field, the sort of thing that’s pretty enough, but lacks a punchy punctum (i.e., images that are fairly pointless, lacking in moment however well they may capture a point in time).
For good or ill, though, I stumbled across a cache of more resonant images (the dates on the folders should perhaps have warned me, but the naming conventions for my digital files are erratic at best – and often misleading) and plunged into a spring of memories, some good, some bad, but all worth keeping (the memories, not necessarily the photographs). It was also getting late – too late, certainly, to try to disentangle a remembrance from its image. So I left the folders as they were, for consideration at some later date.
And of course one never knows when one might wish to use an out-of-focus picture of library stacks from a library one has never revisited.