What keeps coming back

You can title a conversation after it is over. The title is a guess.

What the person valued is what they returned to. Not the cleverest line. Not the theme someone extracted so the pile would have chapters. The thing that kept showing up when nobody was trying to make a book.

Line the sentences up in time. Watch which ones rhyme with later ones. That is a measurement. It does not require you to decide what a mind is. It does not require a theory of the speaker. Preference leaves a fossil in language the same way it leaves a fossil in prices. Return is the revealed utility.

A book made of themes will always feel slightly wrong, because the life was not organized that way. The life was a walk. Package the walk, or you have a hallway that reads well and a person who cannot find himself in it.