Look Homeward, Angel

Whenever a lone of poetry, whenever a song lyric, whenever an entire poem pops into my head, I almost always am able to trace these mind-events to the why-source of their existence. Today's entry was a line from a book I read 51 years ago, when I was seventeen.  My reading, that year, was devoted to the great  writer, Thomas Wolfe.  The line was, ".....a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces."  The book was Look Homeward, Angel.

Recently, a friend made the observation that he finds my blog to be "tinged with sadness".  Judging from the fact that the above quote is the main quote I have taken with me from my seventeenth year, and that the rest of my favorite lines, lyrics and entire poems are also on the, let's say, dark side (although, God knows, I am most certainly also partial to songs like, "Take Me Out to the Ball Game", "Sunny Side of the Street", "Ain't She Sweet", and "You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby"  - - songs my mother loved to sing to me before she became ill) - - he may be right.  On the other hand, I have known incredible joy, have jumped for it (joy), have danced in it (joy), have sung inside it (joy), have laughed my head off in it (in it).  Have exalted in it.  Joy.

But I am getting off point.

A stone, a leaf, a door.

What you lose, what you find. What you see, what you do not see. The past, the present the future.
By seventeen, I surely knew that life is difficult, that being alive is incredible, that my emotions were events,  that life held so many amazements from the huge to the small-but-still-amazing, say, like a new bar of soap is always amazing.....and that there is a past, a present and, I most resoundingly  

hoped, a future.

When I was seventeen, Maurice Nicoll was not yet writing about Time and Physics: "I have already said that if the actuality of the fourth dimension is grasped, all history becomes alive.  All IS, in this dimension, not WAS or WILL BE.  Every moment IS.  Every moment is LIVING.  The world extended is time IS.  The creation of the world IS in time.  It is all PRESENT." - M. Nicoll

I love this stuff. The world in which nothing is lost.  The world in which what was, long ago, still is.  The stories, the early scenes, the early attractions, the old smiles, the early songs, the days themselves, all are.  I can read it and I can type it, but only a certain type of physicist understands it.

A stone, a leaf, a door.

What got to me, I think, when I was seventeen, about this (quite famous) line of Wolfe's, is it's feel for loss and discovery.  (When Freud was a little boy he wold hide his toys so that he could lose them, so that he could have something to seek.  Loss is that compelling. The British psychiatrist, Winnicott, wrote, "It is a joy to be hidden, but a tragedy not to be found.")

So what's this blog really about?  It's about going along, living your life, thinking you've kind of got a handle on what is and what will be (and maybe you do and maybe you don't), dating and then not dating, seeing patients, sure, getting together with friends and family, eating your frozen dinners and making your funny kind of coffee, reading your books, watching your movies and then.... one day, there's that stone, that leaf, that door.