不断寻找航线的远航

读了一篇文章，查字典把生词都搞定，还是没搞明白啥意思，高手解释下：

    Just over a year ago,I foolishly locked up my bicycle outside my office, but forgot to remove the pannier.When i returned the pannier had been stolen. Inside it were about ten of the little red notebook take everywhere for jotting down ideas for articles, short stories, TV shows and the like.

    When I lost my notebooks,I was devastated;all the ideas I`d had over the past two years were contained within their pages.I could remember only a few of them,but had the impression that those i couldn`t recall were truly brilliant.Those little books wer crammed with the plots of award-winning novels and scripts for radio comedy shows that were only two-thirds as bad as the ones on at the moment.

    That`s not all,though. In my reminiscence, my lost notebooks contained sketches for many innovative and incredible machines. In one book there was a design for a device that could turn sea water into apple cider; in another ,plan for an automatic dog; in a third,sketches for a pair of waterproof shoes with television screens built into the toes.Now all of these plans are lost to humanity:

    I found my notebooks again. It turns out they weren't in the bike pannier at all,but in a carrier bag in my spare room, where I found six months after supposedly losing them.and when I flipped through their pages,ready to run to the patent office in the morning , I discovered they were completely full of rubbish.

    Discovering the notebooks really shook me up . I had firmly come to believe they were brimming with brilliant, inventive stuff--and yet clearly they weren't. I had deluded myself.

    After surveying my nonsense,I found that this halo effect always attaches itself to things that seem irretrievably lost. Don't we all have a sneaking feeling that the weather was sunnier ,TV shows funnier and cake-shop buns bunnier in the not-very-distant past?

    All this would not matter much except that it is a powerful element in reactionary thought,this belief in a better yesterday . After all, racism often stems from a delusion that things have deteriorated since "they" came. What a boon to society it would be if people could visit the past and see that it wasn't the paradise they imagine but simply the present with different hats

    Sadly,time travel is impossible .

Until now ,that is .Because I've suddenly remembered I left a leather jacket in an Indonesian restaurant a couples of years ago, and I'm absolutely certain that in the inside pocket there was sketch I'd made …