Pleasure Even Half-Remembered
There’s a certain pleasure that
comes from remembering something
or someone. Sometimes it only takes
a half-remembering but the rush
is the same. Whether the memory is
good or bad or hilarious or embarrassing
(its moral scorecard value which tends
to change if you’re becoming more human
and not just getting older) holds no power
over that initial surge of flat-out relief that
there’s more to life than the here-and-now,
that there was a there-and-then and
something was there or someone was then
and sometimes that was you, alive and knocking
around in life’s vast storehouse of beauty.
Yes! Sorting through old books in the attic, the not-relevant-to-the-future- grad school type of ones, I had such a hard time letting them go, because to touch each one was to touch the memory of the experience of reading it and, on some level, to touch and remember who I was at that time – a person so distantly connected to the here and now. So fascinating to think of how parts of us live on in objects (at least access to parts of who we are/were) so that letting go of the object feels to be letting go of the self. Such a rich vein of thought. Anyway, thanks John, for affirming the “rush.”
Alive and knocking around…
So beautiful. Like an imprint.