Word for Today: Palimpsest

This morning I ran across a word I hadn’t heard in a while since it is so rarely used.  The word:  palimpsest, and I read it in a poem by Longfellow brought to me by “The Writer’s Almanac“:

Night

Into the darkness and the hush of night
     Slowly the landscape sinks, and fades away,
     And with it fade the phantoms of the day,
     The ghosts of men and things, that haunt the
        light.
The crowd, the clamor, the pursuit, the flight,
     The unprofitable splendor and display,
     The agitations, and the cares that prey
     Upon our hearts, all vanish out of sight.
The better life begins; the world no more
      Molests us; all its records we erase
     From the dull common-place book of our lives,
That like a palimpsest is written o’er
     With trivial incidents of time and place,
     And lo! the ideal, hidden beneath, revives.
(Public Domain)

From Wikipedia we learn this:

A palimpsest is a manuscript page, whether from scroll or book that has been written on, scraped off, and used again. The word “palimpsest” comes through Latin from Greek παλιν + ψαω = (”again” + “I scrape”), and meant “scraped (clean and used) again.” Romans wrote on wax-coated tablets that could be smoothed and reused, and a passing use of the rather bookish term “palimpsest” by Cicero seems to refer to this practice.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary adds:

something having usually diverse layers or aspects apparent beneath the surface <Canada…is a palimpsest, an overlay of classes and generations — Margaret Atwood>

One additional, and interesting at least to me, use of the word is also found in the Wikipedia entry:

Several historians are beginning to use the term as a description of the way people experience times, that is, as a layering of present experiences over faded pasts.

If the last use of the word palimpsest is accurate, it would seem to me that we are all palimpsests of a kind:  multi-layered and bound to our pasts even as the events of the present and future make it more and more difficult for us to remember and use what we have previously experienced and learned.  That explains a lot in my opinion.