Sometimes the Desire to Be Lost Again as Long Ago Comes Over Me Like a Vapor

In the middle of something or nothing or maybe everything I cannot recollect, I was interrupted by memory: a short dirt road, warmed by a sunny, unblemished sky, alpine oaks on ane side, fields on the other. The air sweet and thick. Cicadas chirring.

Summertime'south terminate.

I couldn't stop longing for the incommunicable, that sunny curt road. From Arthur Rimbaud: "Ah! That life of my childhood, the high road in all weathers…"

There is something between the bars of poesy, memoirs, pictures—a blueprint lacking common description, a feeling thrown against the backdrop of life. It works your fretfulness. It is and then often mentioned that it bears collecting: this deep, agonized longing for the incommunicable. A place we cannot go or return.

In her well-nigh contempo collection of poems and essays, Upstream, the ever-contemplative American poet Mary Oliver wrote that she longed "to exist lost once more, equally long ago." Her words, compelling but opaque, suggest a demand for space. Oliver walked upstream—did she notice what she sought?

Photograph past Ellen Vrana.

English poet A. E. Housman circled Cambridge University on daily walks. A preeminent classics professor in the early 20th century and a less-distinguished poet of longing (he carried a lifelong unrequited beloved for his heterosexual roommate), Housman took well-paced, lengthy steps marking boundaries where longing could exist, jostling his thoughts and resting his soul.

In periods of acute feeling, such as after his love moved to India, when his longing spilled over into poetry.

Into my centre an air that kills
From yon far state blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the state of lost content,
I run into it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come up over again.

From A. Due east. Housman's "The Land of Lost Content"

A place nosotros cannot return to is also a place where we tin can never arrive.

This impossible longing is further embodied in Doris Lessing's short story "To Room Nineteen." ¹ A woman (who feels achingly familiar)—dominated by the needs of children, family, husband, dwelling, life—lives "in a state of listen she could non own." To own one's infinite, ane'south mind, is, Virginia Woolf tell united states, paramount.

Lessing'south heroine quietly, futilely, seeks space for existence. In a nondescript minor hotel, she finds it: perfect nothingness, anonymity. Lessing won't tell united states what her grapheme does in the room; so complete is the hide.

Ultimately, however, as the title suggests, our heroine is ever travelling, never arriving.

Poet John Clare, who, like Housman, wrote without arrayal, gazed on a place forever gone and recalled:

Often did I stop to gaze
On each spot once beloved to me
Known mong those rememberd days
Of banishd happy infancy
Often did I view the shade
Where in one case a nest my eyes did fill
And oft markd the place I playd
At 'roley poley' down the hill

From Penelope Lively's Dancing Fish and Ammonites

Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

The identify we playd…

The French capture this longing in pitch-perfect phase: Mal du pays.

Homesickness, merely more than than homesickness, a deep longing for places embedded in time. German contains a like word, Fernweh, which means "A longing or need to exist far abroad, anywhere but here." I wonder if that extends to the by.

Time is critical, time prevents u.s. from returning. I stood on my route, even took a photograph. But I volition never return to the road as the child who starting time saw it. I will never return to the road I've kept in retentivity. That road simply doesn't exist. The past—what Oliver beautifully termed "as it was long agone"—is no longer.

In her memoirs, novelist Penelope Lively faced the "as it was long ago" with assuming honesty:

It is gone, it cannot be recovered. It is swamped, drowned out by adult knowledge. That kid self is an conflicting; I take still some glimmer of what she saw, only her mind is unreachable; I know too much, seventy years on.

Perhaps our burden is to long, yes, just non despair. We might not return or arrive at then and at that place, just we can always be now and here.

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Source: https://www.theexaminedlife.org/longing-for-the-impossible/

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