Remembrance of Things Past: A Winter's Tale

Day dawn.—

I am rather depressed. I go to the basement and open my trunk. The basement is in my mountain home; after a long, harsh December, deep in the trunk, when I reach for mementos of past pains and pleasures, I still feel the cold of winter's first day.

The past is a quiet place where change occurs in increments of glacial slowness; it is a perpetually verdant landscape. You can go there and find that nothing much has happened since your last visit.

In probing my childhood (which is the next best to probing one's eternity) I see the awakening of consciousness as a series of spaced flashes, with the intervals between them gradually diminishing until bright blocks of perception are formed, affording memory a slippery hold.

But what is the past? Could it be, the firmness of the past is just illusion? Is there any reason to trust a man in his late fifties, who speaks of his "child's memory" as if it existed, unintruded upon by intervening experience, like an old movie reel, waiting only for a projector? Nobody can really say for sure, because nobody really knows.

Speaking personally, I find that my early childhood memories are planted, first and foremost, in exact snapshots of my photographic memory and in the feelings imprinted in them, and the physical sensations. Then comes memory of being able to hear, and things I heard, then things I thought, and last of all, memory of things I said.Images and symbolic constructs of the past are imprinted in me, almost in the manner of genetic information to become galvanized into what will later be a cinematic re-presentation.

The first pictures surface one by one, like upbeats, flashes of light, with no discernible connection, but sharp and clear. Just pictures, almost no thoughts attached:

It must have been Riga, in winter. The city moat was frozen over. I'm sitting all bundled up with someone on a sled, and we're running smoothly over the ice as if we're on a street. Other sleds overtake us, and people on skates. Everyone's laughing, looking happy. On both sides tree branches are bright and heavy with snow. They bend over the ice; we travel through and under them like through a silver tunnel. I remember going in one end and coming out the other. I think I'm floating. I'm happy. But this picture is quickly scared off by other ones, dark and suffocating, which push into my brain and won't let go. They're like a wall of solid black between me and the sparkling and the sun.

I fight against my depression. I am not well, but I am not mad. I’m after something. Memory, yes. A reel. More than just time. I summon up remembrance of things past. But more than just time.

Mid-day.

A walk in the bright sunshine at noon was a great help to me; from the top of the hill I was enraptured by the ring of snow-capped mountains, which suggested to me a mysterious, unmoving dance. Absorbed long in watching the picture, my spirit heard the music which higher beings reproduce for us in sounds. — The transience of all individual existence, the eternity of the whole, was reflected to me in the blue mirror of the lake.

When one has passed through a narrow gorge and has suddenly arrived at a summit, after which the ways part and the richest prospect opens in different directions, one may linger for a moment and consider which way one should turn first.

My deep inner strength restored, I summoned the Friend from his work and together we wandered up the hill; the magnificent view of mountains looked like a spectral shadow. Fresh snow had fallen, and this partly concealed the crevasses, so that we could not make out the most dangerous places. Here my guide had to take the lead and reconnoiter the paths. At last we reached the opening of the pass leading out to the shallow valley to which a precipitous slope of ice and snow had led us.

We stand among dark boulders, taller than we, that came to rest here 20,000 years ago when the glacier melted and retreated north.

That which has driven me to the steep summit, now holds me spellbound at the abyss's edge: I now felt that strange and mysterious sensation which is awakened in the mind when looking down from lofty hilltops, and now I was able to do so without any feeling of nervousness, having fortunately hardened myself to that kind of sublime contemplation. I wholly forgot who I was, and where I was.

I am at peace at the edge of the abyss.