AncienTrails

Lughnasa                                                             Harvest Moon

Do you ever have a twinge of regret or a moment of disappointment about all the things you won’t be able to read, to learn?  I do.  And sometimes the ache is terrible.  It can be non-specific.  The library, that is my library, has more threads than I can follow in one life time.  My own library.  What about the UofM library?  The internet?  A good bookstore?

(Amour, Foi, Esperance – Maurice Denis)

It can be specific.  I won’t be learning Mandarin this time through.  I’m not going to get a good feel for geology either, or biochemistry.  Even sociology, beyond a brush in college, is out.  So are most of the world’s literatures and all those paintings and sculptures I just can’t get to see.  It could be, of course, that I wouldn’t want to know the sociology of Poland, but I bet I would.  I’m sure I’d like to understand the working of plate tectonics at a deeper than cursory level, but I won’t.  The same for the chemical exchanges that make life possible.  Nope.

This makes me sad.  Not in a terrible sadness way, not grief, not even really regret, more a prospective nostalgia for something that will not happen.  I can fell it creeping up on me when I look at book, say a history of Japan, and wonder if I’m really going to devote time to reading that.  If I’m honest and say to myself probably not, that’s when the feeling rises.  Oh.  But if only I could give some time in the evening.  Maybe then.  But no.  Not likely, not really.  Oh.

(Psyche’s Kin Bid Her Farewell on a Mountain Top – Maurice Denis)

Most of us have, I imagine, a small collection of sayings that recur to us, sometimes often, that help guide us in making decisions.  One that comes to my mind a lot is this:  Purity of heart is to will one thing.  When I have to prune, to focus my life, to move my attention toward some task that will take a long time, I remember it.  It feels important to me, true.  Right.

Yet.  To will one thing is to rule out all those others.  To leave them on the shelf, to abandon their discovery, the excitement of learning what they may have to teach.  Thus I have this difficult (to me) internal contradiction between wanting, even needing, to focus my energy and desiring broad as well as a deep learning.  This is one of those paradoxes with which I have to make my peace, I suppose, but I don’t find it easy.  It may not be possible.