3.03.2010

100th post - Memory

It's hard to believe I've written a hundred posts since I started writing this, almost a year ago. I guess that's not actually so impressive; more fascinating is how the blog has changed in nature. It started as a "cooking blog," almost a tutorial. Looking back at my older posts is like looking back at an old diary. I feel nostalgic, embarrassed, and always, an urge to correct what I wrote, to change my opinion, to alter the (now) limited perspective I had at one time.

It's funny how remembering can feel like looking back at time through the wrong end of a telescope. Everything is reduced to images, spurts of scent, color, sound; but in going through that long metal tube, emotions disappear, or maybe they are stretched so thin they become imperceptible. But reading something, real words I'd written down, intentionally, thoughtfully, has the opposite effect:  feelings like the ones you had then fill you up, overcome you.

In my ISA program here, we move around Italy on large charter buses, stopping only at our destinations (the tiny hill towns, Bologna, Rome), the occasional gas station and food pavilion, a scenic vista on our way back to Florence. I worry that most of my memories will be of the views through the plastic windows, pages turning in my books, the backs of people's heads.

But then I remember I've been writing this, writing in my journal, and I'm reassured.

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