2008/08/07

August, he knows

A sweltering August day; the panic of observing moving hours, heavy like Jeanette Winterson's "slabs of sunshine". As I walked through the lawn near the house I felt I elbowed my way through these shortish golden moments, as if it could build up the happy summer hours in the country for me. I don't feel sorry that we had to get back from the mountains earlier than we'd planned. It's better here hundredfold and the mere thought of leaving for Warsaw on Monday gives me the shivers.
I usually don't bear the mythological cult of the childhood; I wouldn't like to go back and I don't consider myself to have been a happy kid. But I undoubtedly miss the child's perception of time as a great ocean – those crawling hours, so huge, completely not made to the size of a small human I was. This is where my archetype images come from; they're broad and exhaustive since they encompassed amounts of time and space greater than today's hasty, fragmentary snapshots. I feel the need to rely on those prototypes because today, although in the summertime I deliberately don't ware my wristwatch, the hours seem rationed out, so frightfully tiny – yes – it's another reason for my anxiety. I try not to despair, just like Magda Umer tried.
And I try to fight, so today I stopped to breathe in the beautiful August evening: golden, almost red light, the moon over the orchard, one black swallow on the multicolored sky – "and so on", as Virginia Woolf would say.
I listen to the songs of Justin Hayward and I miss love.

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