Synchronicity

For this week’s blog, I honestly couldn’t think of anything to write about, other than the difficulty I’m having writing this paper. It’s not that I don’t know what I want to say (it could be that I have so much to say that it’s becoming hard to whittle it all down), but the story I want to tell involves me revisiting past events that aren’t necessarily the most positive. And then I realize: this is the theme of the entire paper, trying to let those things go. Maybe I’m in a wistful mood, or maybe I’ve been jamming Van Morrison’s Veedon Fleece too much lately (check this out if you haven’t, and everything he did from ‘68-‘74 if you haven’t), but I really started thinking about this, and thinking about the discussion we started a few weeks back about memory, and it’s ultimate faultiness. Are situations ever really as bad as we remember them? If they are, can’t we be allowed to forget them, and move on? Or at least incorporate them and move on?

Then, along with this theme, I’ve had one of those strange, universal moments of synchronicity we all seem to have when we’re not looking for those connections, as we often do as English majors. Reading for the comps, I just finished taking notes on Thoreau’s Walden, and this cosmic quote hit me, and encapsulated everything I had been thinking:

“We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing our duty. We loiter in winter while it is already spring” (245).

We do indeed loiter in the winter, and sometimes miss all the good and alive things rushing past our window, like craning our neck to see something on the side of the road that’s already long past. Thinking about further connections, Van Morrison’s “Who Was That Masked Man,” features lyrics about not being able to move on, and the detriment it can cause to that person. He says “Oh ain’t it lonely, when you’re living with a gun/When you can’t slow down and you can’t turn round, and you can’t trust anyone.” His metaphor, “living with a gun,” is a little more paranoid than I would like, but check out his conclusion: “When the ghost comes round at midnight/Well you both can have some fun/He can drive you mad, he can make you sad/He can keep you from the sun.” Now, I don’t mean to be reaching here, but the “ghost” at midnight sounds a little like Dickens “ghost of Christmas past,” haunting the person in question with past sins that keep him from seeing the daylight. Sound a bit like Thoreau’s “loitering”? I don’t know, but this will definitely be incorporated in the paper.