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I
Almost everything is supposed to get away from us. This is our grief. As a condition, it doesn't have to be sad. Really, the sadness comes in, the sepia sadness comes seeping in, from keeping what can't be kept anyhow. Many have wept. Many weep. It is exasperating.
It is also tempting, because it is so easy. It is easy to keep a little notebook, to press a few of the blossoms from an individual spring. Once you start thinking like that, it makes perfect sense to go farther, to preserve a representative bloom from each plant from every place and season and year you have known. Each is so beautiful and worthy.
And this is not untrue; but it is hobbling. Yes, exactly as though a great horse were restrained from running and trampling for joy. There is a kind of dangerous piety to it. The powerful lineaments of the mighty horse are all ignored in the cataloguing of one variegated patch of spring.
Cavalier. We must be somewhat cavalier in this rich historical word's most contemptuous sense. We must run roughshod over what threaten to become memories. For the truth is that memories are indistinguishable from matter in that they can neither be created (despite the claims of vacation brochures) nor destroyed.
You don't have to worry so much about them, in other words. And you will find that you experience a new availability of energy when you give up trying to preserve what preserves itself. You are relieved of a false and debilitating humility and can enter into a roomier frustration, a more generous appreciation of loss.
For of course it is only within the context of loss that anything can be said to be found. That seems ridiculously obvious, and yet we struggle against it. And isn't finding, the moment of finding, our supreme thrill? We call it discovery and make much of it, forgetting that it is the gift of loss.
Still, it is as dangerous to cultivate loss as it is to try to stop it through the keeping of notebooks; we are a self-regarding creature and we will watch ourselves losing and become bewitched by our own affecting actions. We are so moved by ourselves. This is...