Looking back

Several years ago, I wrote an essay in this blog entitled "The Moors of Boyhood," describing how seeing a lonely tree through dense fog as I walked to school allowed me to believe I was walking across the moors of England, through the world of Sherlock Holmes and The Hound of the Baskervilles.

But fog changed all perceptions.  Nothing was visible but the sidewalk on which I walked -- and the mysterious tree.  Sure, maybe I was merely in the home town in which I'd been born and reared.  But I might be in Yorkshire, or on Dartmoor, or creeping across the Scottish highlands.  And for a few moments -- as the shadowy tree became visible and then vanished back into the fog -- I found myself half a world away from my tedious life as a schoolboy in the Northwest Corner.

I was in ninth grade, not a kid.  But I still saw magic in the fog.

I saw magic elsewhere.  At about the same age, I remember walking to the library through a small park in the middle of my town, during spring while the trees were in bloom.  The trees were clearly attractive, and I'm sure I'd noticed them before.  But for the first time, their beauty felt overwhelming, almost making me cry.  The feeling was almost creepy, it was so intense.  Why had I never noticed them before?  

Even certain first-year piano pieces my brother was playing about that time struck me as more enjoyable than they deserved  -- not awesome in the same way as the fog and the flowering trees, but not merely the fumbling attempts of my kid brother, either.

In his essay "Intimacy" in a collection entitled Alibis, André Aciman recalls being obsessed as a boy in his mid-teens by the bookstores in the heart of Rome, and how that obsession eventually spilled over into a love of the city for which he had at first felt indifference.  He felt, however, that it was not so much that he loved the city itself, but that he was using the city to reflect his own inner literary-prompted yearnings -- what he calls a "film.".  As an adult, he reflects

It wasn't Rome itself I was seeing, it was the film, the filter I'd placed on the old city that finally made me love it, the film I went to seek each time I'd go to a bookstore and would come out late in the evening to stroll down my Nevsky Prospekt in search of vague smiles and fellowship in a city I wasn't even sure existed on the sidewalks.  It is the film I can no longer lift off the many books I read back then, the film that reverberates over time and continues to make Rome mine long after I've lost it.  And perhaps it is the film I go in search of each time I'm back in Rome -- not Rome.

He often finds it difficult, as an adult, to recover this "film" when he visits his old haunts -- what he sees now is simply buildings and streets.  Except for those times when the stars align properly, and all of a sudden he is once more an adolescent wandering through magical streets.

For myself, clearly the fog had always been there, the flowers bloomed every spring, and pianos were played everywhere. It was something about me, within me, that invested these common sights and sounds with wonder. Something very similar to Aciman's obsessive reading at that age, reading that permitted him to view the streets of his not-so-glamorous part of the city as reflections of images from the books he had been reading.

The sense of losing whatever "film" we each once used to cover and modify our own sense perceptions is painful.  I recall realizing in my mid-teens that poring over the glories of my stamp collection no longer gave me the same glow of avarice and accomplishment that it had a year or so earlier.  In his memoir Uncle Tungsten, Oliver Sacks describes his childhood obsession with chemistry, and how he unexpectedly lost that obsession when he was about 14.  Looking back, he laments his loss of enthusiasm, and wonders what caused it.

Was it, perhaps, ... that I was growing up, and that "growing up" makes one forget the lyrical, mystical perceptions  of childhood, the glory and the freshness of which Wordsworth wrote, so that they fade into the light of common day?

In his Autobiography, the brilliant mathematician Bertrand Russell recalls the joys of his adolescent enthusiasm with classical poetry and his lyrical appreciation of sunsets and clouds and trees.   Unlike Aciman and Sacks, Russell refuses to worry about the loss of these feelings:  "My interest was of a very sentimental kind, owing to the fact that it was an unconscious sublimation of sex, and an attempt to escape from reality."

So much for that, says the great mathematician dismissively.  Whatever hormonal basis may exist for our emotions, to me it seems a bit reductionist to claim that human existence can be boiled down to a few mathematical equations and chemical fomulas.

Aciman takes his wife and three teenage sons back to Rome, back to visit the street he had lived on as a boy.  Just as he feared, he feels nothing, no nostalgia, no sense of returning to childhood.  The visit was brief, and his boys seem somewhat puzzled about what their dad had hoped to see.  And Aciman realizes that he was now seeing his old neighborhood as it really was -- a lower middle-class, rather dreary outlying neighborhood of Rome. 

As a teenager, on the other hand, he had "radiated" an aura from his own readings in literature, clothing the otherwise bare and impoverished world around him -- a "film" as he calls it, "which is how we become aware of the world, and, ultimately, why we come to love it."  He no longer was projecting the same film, the same connection to the neighborhood; it had therefore lost its attraction and interest.

I may no longer see Dartmoor in a fog bank, or a personal empire in a stamp collection.  But whatever "films" I may have projected over my own old neighborhoods, making them exciting and tolerable, those films still seem to be glowing brightly today.  I can walk through the streets of my home town, and happily imagine myself as still being 10 or 15 or 18 years old, depending on the neighborhood. 

And I'd love to spend a few days reliving some of those early days.