All Too Soon

Melancholy and nostalgia, complex emotions, … tempered, … perhaps causally related. The sadness in melancholy, at least to me, anchored in the soulful reminiscence and longing drawn from nostalgia and both augmented if one has lived in too many places, perhaps with too many people, but in my particular case, most of all by the echoes and shadows cast by my three sons, particularly now that Alex is planning, after more than half a decade, to return to his other home.

I keep those powerful yet subtle emotions at bay, usually, by hiding from them and from myself, losing myself in social and civic endeavors, in my students, in sleep and in dreams, but they’re just gaining strength, which leaps out, … not really unexpectedly, on somber sunny days, when one memory leading to another guides me back.

Life is so strange in so many ways, an explicable phenomena in some, if one believes in faith, almost inexplicable otherwise. Why would an evolving universe deviate so from its quest for perfection?

Perhaps because life and art are inextricably bound and life would seem to be the universe’s attempt at art, and given the nature of art, pretty good art at that. Apparently (something too many of our ruling elites too often forget except for their own personal possession), art is essential for that quirkily evolved life form of which I appear to be a part (unless I’m just a sleeping flower’s dream).

Art causes and cures melancholy using nostalgia as both brush and medium, I’ll be needing much more of that all too soon.
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