I keep photos on my wall, not many, but enough to summon ghosts.
A photo fixes a moment as a lepidopterist a butterfly with a pin, forever midflight. A photo may fade but it does not age. Poems and paintings, being visions, we revise with time, but a photo, by preserving exactly, restores us exactly. I am fifty again, or forty, or five, dizzy with the vertigo of retrospect.
“Where did the time go?” The question is trite but not the feeling. We shudder at so much vanishing. We are the same, continuous since then, yet somehow different, barely related. How did that happen? We try to connect the dots, but we can’t, too much has been lost.
Reason wrestles this perplexity, then quits, shrugging, “What can you do?” Minds confront phenomena as climbers do cliffs, abandoning the attempt if mastery is too hard. So do puzzlers take on a manageable level of difficulty. Disbarred from the past, we turn our gaze elsewhere for, unlike Janus, we can only look one way.
The inaccessibility of the past disheartens. Writers may feel this more than others. The stories I could tell if returned to boyhood locations! – I dispatch myself, notebook poised – but the actors dissolve at my approach, even their names. A sibling must have been present, but I cannot see her. Are my parents really themselves or performers reiterating my tired script?
A snapshot restores yesterday in its complexity. Here I am with son Peter after his bar-mitzvah: father proud (and young!), son glad (and relieved!). Of the intervening thirty years (thirty!), I’ve a drawerful of scraps, a few facts, but what were his college – or early manhood – years like? We knew each other then only for holidays or fleeting hellos. I long to know him then – and his father – but both are missing chapters.
Nostalgia is not my subject here: that sweet sad longing for a happier hour. Nostalgia is not one of my diseases. Happiest here, I’d gladly revisit my past but relocate? Never!
What taunts me is not what I experienced but what I didn’t, the corners I didn’t turn, the questions I didn’t ask. What if I’d said yes to that scary invitation instead of shying? Propriety prevented me: what if I hadn’t shuddered at that touch!
Humans’ tragedy is not what we did but what we didn’t, our solitary confinement to one self only. Robert Frost wrestled this hurt in his perfect poem, “The Road Not Taken”. “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,” the singer recalls,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Hindsight strives to congratulate us on our luck. And oh, how I bless my stars! But what else might I have learned, felt, suffered, done! My photos return me to those instants of bristling possibility. Where might we go from here!