Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
– Burnt Norton, TS Eliot
I’ve read Four Quartets before, but not in a single sitting and not in a long, long time. The poems leave me me breathless, speechless, seeming to touch something ineffable that I can’t put into words but that makes me nod with deep identification.
Lately, it’s about a topic I’ve returned to over and over and over again, which is the compression of time, the non-linear nature of the past and the present and, though it’s harder for me to grasp, the future. What do I mean? Living where I do, I dance daily with memories from both the last 24 years (Matt and I moved into this house in 2001, had and raised both of our babies here, and are still here now that they are gone) and from my own childhood (I moved around a lot as a kid but Cambridge was home, and I was born in a house half a mile from where I live now and my parents moved to a house when I was in high school that’s a mile in the other direction. If you didn’t know about my peripatetic childhood, you would think I’d spent my entire 51 year life in a square mile of Cambridge, Massachusetts. One thing that strikes me upon re-reading Four Quartets is that so many lines I regularly hear in my head and reflect on are from that poem. In this case, the still point of the turning world. That’s what Cambridge is and has always been for me.
This past weekend Grace and I were talking about how darkness is falling earlier and earlier these days. I’ve written about that too (is the story of my midlife the way certain themes will recur, over and over again, in my life and in my writing? perhaps). She was talking about how it feels sad to sit in the office and watch dusk fall outside the window, and I had a visceral memory of being in my first job out of college, in the fall of 1996, sitting on the 31st floor and watching darkness come outside the window. I recall the emotion she described so profoundly! I also recall that in the years that followed I started finding the arrival of darkness in the fall less sad and more reassuring, somehow, and that that transition marked something important.
But what I’m struck by today is the universality – at least between Grace and myself – of this feeling, this awareness of the hours of day and night and how the the shifting border between them makes us feel. I talked to Matt yesterday while he was on the west coast, and he facetimed me as he watched the sunset over the Pacific. Using technology, across the continent, I enjoyed the sunset. AND I marveled at the fact that my life partner knew that this would matter to me.
The interplay of light and dark is one of my most abiding themes. You might call me a broken record.
Today I’m thinking of 22 year old me sitting in her glass high rise watching sunset gather, and of 22 year old Grace doing the exact same thing. Time past and future both contained in time present. No question about it.
