Like the poet Yeats, I often find that thought, and indeed life as a whole, is like a winding stair: you keep revisiting the same points, the same themes, but at higher levels of experience. From those ascending vantage points a given idea, a given feeling, a given perception, is recognizably itself and yet somehow different. One’s understanding of it becomes richer, sometimes in ways that are continuous, sometimes in ways that are revolutionary.
