After 2 or 3 hours of meandering Costco’s busy aisles this morning, I relaxed on the deck and read the literary magazine Geist: Fact and Fiction, Summer 2012. (www.geist.com)
A few sentences on page 22 from Claudia Cornwall’s essay titled That Beautifully Unworldly, Reasonless Rampaging of My Old Self resonated with me about complex memories of summers at Washburn Island.
In the story, Curt Lang kept a diary of a one-year European adventure with three equally penniless friends in 1955. When in London on a slightly rainy and sombre day in March, 1956, he noted:
The past is always so alive. It encroaches like a green tide on every hour and day, breeding a sadness in everything. A summer sun reminds me of lost summer suns, the rain of misspent days.
And two days later he writes:
All the usual discontents and doubts banging around inside.
Curt Lang’s imagery elicited a strong emotional connection with me, something that I could not have identified at the same age he was when he so casually wrote his impressions in his diary.
MARY E. MCINTYRE'S FORTHCOMING BOOK:
Posted by dacemara on July 22, 2012 at 8:30 pm
Mary, for all the joyful sunny days of your youth spent at Washburn, it does sound as though what’s most present now is the melancholy of it all. Maybe that’s the legacy of the past living on in us. “All the usual discontents and doubts banging around inside” is such a powerful image of why we write memoir, and why liberating (ourselves from) the past is so healing. Kurt Lang’s musings certainly are far and away more insightful than anything I ever thought to enter in my diary of early years!
Posted by Mary on July 23, 2012 at 2:26 am
Sometimes these comments just knock you over the head. Why didn’t I think of that?