“We can't go back,” writes the bells in his lovingly moving countdown. “We can move forward. We can find the love our hearts long for, but not until we release the grief with the love we lost long ago.”
Yet we go back, repeating. The sad flaw of our species is the price we pay for the good mental ability to travel in time: the great power of observation that enables us to make a plan and make a promise is combined with the singular suffering of looking back: regret, remorse, the past made with love and without its consequences.
It's tempting, this visit is for a selected time. Have a great weekend with the imperfect lover you never knew was going to break your heart. A painful summer just before diagnosis, tragedy, death. Time you were ten pounds easy and ten choices free and ten mistakes slightly damaged in the mirror of the mind. Over and over again, the hand of memory goes back, holding a moment in the past when life was easier or brighter or more vibrant with life, forgetting that the only thing you have to keep is naked now, vulnerable like a newborn baby, absolutely forever.
The greatest challenge, the greatest triumph, is to make memory an instrument of existence. That's what Diane Seuss offers in her beautiful poem “Weeds,” found in her absolutely stunning collection. Modern Poetry (public library).
YOU ARE GROWING UP
by Diane SeussThe danger of memory goes away
in it to get a break. Rest the risks
getting stuck. Don't pretend
yourself with life
in your previous version
that was very naked. It is possible
it was better then, but you were
not better. You were as young as rain
the gauge must be filled to capacity
and its full share of suffering.
What can memory be in these terrible times?
Discipline only. It is not a place to stay.
Or you should stay:
The sweet smell of the weed.
It smells like weed now.
Endurance. Standing. Relaxation.
Couples with Virginia Woolf on the nature of memory and Oliver Sacks on the need to forget, then revisits George Saunders on how to live a life of regret.
