the-past

I now know how your angercame from skeletonsthat rattled in your heartand you couldn't escape them.

The Englishman left months ago, Hana, he's with the Bedouin or in some English garden with its phlox and shit.

But it is always easy to put together stories about a past which nobody any longer remembers, like those about journeys to countries where nobody has ever been.

She used to wander through the past as often as it beckoned her, bemoaning the loss of nostalgia. Then, for a while, she turned from it, blissfully free of its noxious clutch, and now it's back, taunting her with what she left behind, knowing she can never recapture what's gone.

When one embraces a moment of rapture from the past, either by trying to reclaim it or by refusing to let it go, how can its brightness not tarnish, turn grey with longing and sorrow, until the wild spell of the remembered interlude is lost altogether and the memory of sadness claims its rightful place in the mind? And what is it we expect from the sun-drenched past? There is no formula for re-entry, nothing we can do to enable reconstruction.

Happiness is like good health: when you have it, you don__ notice it. But as the years go by, oh, the memories, the memories of happiness past!

The past and present are after all so close, almost one, as if time were an artificial teasing out of a material which longs to join, to interpenetrate, and to become heavy and very small like some of those heavenly bodies scientists tell us of.

I told her I was not sure I could bear living with memories, she said, Look up at the stars, look, they are not there, what you see is the memory of what once was, once upon a time.

When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.

A great mystery lies in the repetition and continuity of the renewal of that which is past. Culture perpetuates itself in memory and the big job is the reawakening of memory.

Some of our friends are our friends only because we used to be friends.

I thought about how the past can become so small. An entire day, 24 separate, heavy hours, becomes the size of a tiny brown leaf falling from a tree. Before you know it, a whole year is just a pile of dead leaves on the ground. The year or so I__ spent in love with Chad was starting to feel so long ago, swept away by the wind. I knew that this year would soon feel far away too.

how sad and bad and mad it was - but then, how it was sweet

in these shitty plastic days ...

had almost forgotten the wet brush of your kisses_ soft as April snowflakes

And then I got to thinking about how, if someone met me for the first time now, they would need to know about Uncle Ed and my parents in order to understand me. Sometimes it feels as though I__ defined by all the people I__e lost , like one of those negative-space pictures, where what__ not there is just as important as what is.

Almost all sadness comes from thinking about the past, and all worry from thinking about the future _ present-mindedness is your only safe haven.

If there were past misdeeds, I do not believe we should nag or repeat them, never mind throw them in someone__ face. If they sincerely apologized and we genuinely forgave them, we must move on. Learn from mistakes, but move on. If we bring them up and toss them at the offender, we may not have actually forgiven them, even if we claim we have.