Saturday, December 10, 2011

Purging












That night I shut myself in my room, barred my windows, drew my curtains, and made a great destruction.  All books or pictures which recalled to me the moorlands were ruthlessly doomed.  Novels, poems, treatises I flung into an old box, for sale to the second-hand bookseller.  Some prints and water-colour sketches I tore to pieces with my own hands.  I ransacked my fishing-book, and condemned all tackle for moorland waters to the flames. I wrote a letter to my solicitors, bidding them to go no further in the purchase of a place in Lorne I had long been thinking of.  Then, and not till then, did I feel the bondage of the past a little loosed from my shoulders.  I made myself a night-cap of rum-punch instead of my usual whisky-toddy, that all associations with that dismal land might be forgotten, and to complete the renunciation I returned to cigars and flung my pipe into a drawer.









But when I woke in the morning I found that it is hard to get rid of memories.  My feet were still sore and wounded, and when I felt my arms cramped and reflected on the causes, there was that black memory always near to vex me.











From No-Man's Land (John Buchan, 1898)

5 comments:

  1. Yes, yes, I need to purge as well. It's really amazing, how it stirs the memories . . . It is one of the things I am most afraid of, now that my mother is so sick. Her house full of all that was, once upon a time . . .

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  2. I understand (and have lived) the fear. My thoughts are with you on this. I've also passed through it, relatively unscathed (if that is any comfort), ultimately (in the words of the songwriter) diminished but not finished. Curtis

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  3. Purging memories. Is it really possible to rid oneself of life experienced? I don't think so. But I have had the experience of confronting, exploring, and trying to understand them, especially the terribly painful ones, and then emerging stronger even with the knowledge of them fully intact.

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  4. Hi Nell. I wish I knew. Andy Warhol once wrote: "Every day's a new day because I can't remember the one before." I keep that in mind, plus Elvis's "I Forgot To Remember To Forget." Curtis

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