Tag: Past

Lightly Child, Lightly.

Live & Learn27 Comments

As you embark on something like this, as you comb through the years, you are confronted with something like an identity parade of former selves. Here they come, shuffling into the white room, in front of the black horizontal bars, all dressed differently (up until around the age of 40 at any rate), all with slightly different haircuts, different ideas about the world, all awkwardly taking their place in the line-up and squinting at the two-way glass. Aspects of all these personas have been jettisoned along the way to get you to whoever you are now. The Usual Rejects. Some of these old versions of you will be more familiar than others, but, for most of us, they will all be shuffling around twitchily to some degree or other. Guilty. How do you rate these old selves? Look back ten or fifteen or twenty years. What was that guy like? How would you rank them in the pantheon of former selves? […]

But, still, here they both are, next to each other in the line-up, squinting into the glare, taking their turn stepping forward – ‘OK, you deadbeats. Start talking.’ Some of them you just want to fetch a mug of tea for. To roll out the good cop, the guy who will say, ‘Hey, you were young, don’t be too hard on yourself kid.’ But there are others, the real offenders, who you want to grab by the lapels and scream, ‘Are you kidding me with this shit?’ You want to reach back through the years and drag them down to the cells, where you will turn off the recording equipment and get busy with the rubber pipe and the rolled telephone book.

Because that’s what it feels like to me, the memoir. A forced confession.

― John Niven, O Brother (Canongate Books, August 24, 2023)

Notes:

  • Book Review & Portrait of John Niven via Herald Scotland: “Author John Niven on his moving family memoir O Brother”  August 19 2023
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

you are positive that this is all you’ve ever wanted in the world

Live & Learn16 Comments

There is no explaining this simple truth about life: you will forget much of it. The painful things you were certain you’d never be able to let go? Now you’re not entirely sure when they happened, while the thrilling parts, the heart-stopping joys, splintered and scattered and became something else. Memories are then replaced by different joys and larger sorrows, and unbelievably, those things get knocked aside as well, until one morning you’re picking cherries with your three grown daughters and your husband goes by on the Gator and you are positive that this is all you’ve ever wanted in the world.

— Ann Patchett, Tom Lake: A Novel (Harper, August 1, 2023)

With Meryl Streep narrating the Audiobook

Lightly Child, Lightly.

Live & Learn14 Comments

Their experiences in the world are involvingly varied: one was a nurse in Colombia, another an orchid keeper in Vietnam. But as I prompt them with questions to write about, I feel repeatedly surprised by how alike their answers sound. 

What do you miss from your past? 

The warmth of home, the smell of grandmother’s cooking. 

What is life like in the present? 

Confusing. Lonely. 

What surprises you about Denver? 

People sleeping on the streets. In my country they’d be with family. 

When you picture your future, what do you hope? 

Safe children. To feel at home. To live my dreams.

— John Cotter, Losing Music: A Memoir (Milkweed Editions, April 11, 2023)

 

Notes:

  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

Lightly Child, Lightly.

Live & Learn24 Comments

“Memorize places,” his uncle had told him. “Settle your eyes on a place and learn it. See it under the snow, and when first grass is growing, and as the rain falls on it. Feel it and smell it, walk on it, touch the stones, and it will be with you forever. When you are far away, you can call it back. When you need it, it is there, in your mind.”

― Tony Hillerman, The Ghostway

Notes:

  • Photo DK @ Daybreak. 32° F. 7:00 am to 7:31am. December 28, 2022. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. More pictures from yesterday morning’s walk here.
  • Quote: Thanks Beth @ Alive on All Channels.
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

Live & Learn14 Comments

Five years ago, you were teacher of the year and now this.

All this would be fine—well, not exactly fine but manageable—if you were not due at this faculty meeting in half an hour. You look at the other drivers—some passing you, and some you are passing. You look at their faces and wonder how great the gap is between who they are and who they know they could be. You’re on Interstate 10. The I-10 is known to locals, depending on your direction, as the San Bernardino Freeway or the Santa Monica Freeway. Freeways here, true to the romantic nature of the West and its ever-hopeful revision of the life that came before, are made for movement and the future and they’re named for where you’re going—not where you’ve been.

The past, well, that’s for when you turn around. Where you’ve been is only important in the context of where you are. And if where you are this moment is good, the past makes sense and every moment of horror and dread seems worth it. If where you are is terrible, the past just seems like an accumulation of data that confirm you were on this path all along.

How things end up matters.

— Rob Roberge, Liar: A Memoir (Crown, February 9, 2016)

Photo of Santa Monica Freeway (10)