August 21: Age & Memory
I just listened to a youtube clip of Tom Hiddleston reciting an excerpt of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. The excerpt is from “Word and Music: Memory.” The last lines really touched me and after listening, I sat in wonder at what age is able to give us and I saw something transcendent in the words of Proust, and I thought that with aging, we are able to add a significant layer of perceiving to our lives, our history, and our destiny. This perceiving is not just a gift to ourselves, but a beacon to those who are younger and wonder, like so many of us do at one time or another in our youth (or, if you’re like me, many times, all the time throughout our lives), “who am I?” and “why am I here on this planet?” The quote is this:
“When from a long distant past, nothing subsists,
after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still,
alone more fragile with more vitality more, unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time
like souls ready to remind us waiting and hoping for their moment amid the ruins of all the rest and, there, unfaltering in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.”
What is this vast structure of recollection? For me, it is not only a memory of an event, but it is much bigger and it is revelatory. It has the feel of warmth, as tough you were in a roomful of friends, and the feel of heightened joy, like a moment of ecstasy. It is a curtain that opens up to a vista never seen before. It is an understanding of things beyond their particular thingness. It is an opening to a new hope that meaning is present in the glow of memory since it somehow substantiates the subtle knowing that we are all ages at once. And, with old age we see with such clarity the beauty of our youth, our middle years and all that comes after. Only age can make this spectacular understanding a reality. Perhaps that is why we, as humans, grow old and why we feel saddened and bewildered when we see a young person die, not having this extraordinary time, this time of vast recollection that comes with age, in their own lifetime.