destroy the future in order to save the past

Wallowing in nostalgia is fun, but the future is at least better than the present, which is too quickly hurtling into the realm of “past.”

I’m about to re-read Proust’s Swann’s Way (in English, unfortunately) and to finish the remaining novels in the series. I realize that this’ll take FOREVER, but if all goes well with the grad school thing, from now until August 07 is probably one of the few times in my life when time is cheap.

I total know why I would want to do this, living life usto be soooo easy and fun. Now I am growing up and I find things less enjoyable.. I try to laugh and enjoy life as much as I can but I always find myself wanting to go back to how everything usto be soo young and naive ( there are perks to this believe it or not) Seeing the beauty in everything and everyone… but things just happen to you and it changes your perspective on life, love, everything. hmm to destroy the future or not?

ALSO… i find myself doing things redundantly that I know the “old” me would’nt do, things that are bad for me physically and emotionally. I guess this goal should really entail “changing” the future, I truly believe we create our own destiny.

I guess I just want to be that fun loving carefree Danielle. Is that too much to ask? I guess we have to grow up at some point but I will never forget my past and how I was…. I am sure it will facilitate the future in some way, shape or form.

I believe innumerable futures are destroyed every instant of existence. We have one past and seemingly only one destination. Practically, in our own endearing and limited way, this is the only way we can envisage life. To say more would be useless, to all intents and purposes. By sitting here and writing this, I destroy all of the futures in which I didn’t sit here and write this. But, in doing so, I create something which serves as a reminder of the time I was provoked to think about destroying the future. That single past, the only past, has been in some small way saved.

I also believe that belief is the single most powerful force in the universe, but that’s another story.

It feels like the past is all there is, and all you can do is run in that direction, as fast as you can. Only it’s like going the wrong way on an escalator—you just end up with a lot of motion and not a lot of action.

We so firmly believed in the linkage of life,
but now I’ve looked back – and it is astonishing
to what a degree you, my youth,
seem in tints not mine, in traits not real.

If one probes it, it’s rather like a wave’s haze
between me and you, between shallow and sinking,
or else i see telegraph poles and you from the back
as right into the sunset you ride on your half-racer.

You’ve long ceased to be I. You’re an outline – the hero
of any first chapter; yet how long we believed
there there was no break in the way from the damp dell
to the alpine heath.

Nostalgia – Mark Strand

The professors of English have taken their gowns
to the laundry, have taken themselves to the fields.
Dreams of motion circle the Persian rug in a room you
were in.
On the beach the sadness of gramophones
deepens the ocean’s folding and falling.
It is yesterday. It is still yesterday.

I will never feel the same about the past again after reading Proust.

“The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.”