It’s strange how, for pretty much all of my life, I have had this kind of innate feeling of pining for a lost time.
And the older I get, I suppose it makes more sense. After all, the longer we live this life, the more we seem to accumulate our share of regrets, or of people we can now never meet again. (As Dante once said - there is nothing more tragic in times of hurt than memories of better days)
But even as a child - literally, some of my earliest memories are of wishing things could be how they used to be. Though, frankly, I still have no idea where this “used to be” even is!
So, perhaps I was born to always look back. (and much like Orpheus or Lot . . . it is a habit which has certainly not served me very well over the years!)
Yet still - I can’t help feeling that this “looking back” is something so fundamental in so many of us too.
I think of the pre-Raphaelite artists “looking back” to rediscover the lost ideals of the renaissance.
Or the cathedrals that have been built by “classical ideals”
Or the poets of ancient Greece - who devoted their lives to composing stories set in a past “golden age”, of Titans, Gods and Heroes.
And I realise that art is not always about trying to create something new - but, rather, it is often a quest to rediscover something that must have been lost somehow.
Memories of Eden When all we needed was our Freedom But seasons range and people change and friends become estranged. And colour schemes like past routines turn to nothing else but dreams Yet here I stay to simply say I miss the better days
Borges, in his story 'The immortal' begins by quoting Francis Bacon's Essays, LVIII. "Salomon saith, There is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Salomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion."
It is a quote I carry with me more than 25 years. Somehow it resonates with what you write today.
Your poem is absolutely beautiful.
There is no doubt that I hold similar feelings. My practice of writing in a daily journal is a place where I capture current state of affairs. However, many years ago, I felt the need to create a separate place/journal that holds past memories dear to my heart. I choose not to forget them, but instead I give them the honor and the grace I believe they deserve.