Time Regained, Time Made
見出された時、作られる時
It is autumn again, and again the scent of lime blossom has risen from a plain white cup.
I began these pages with just such a scent, and I end them, as I must, in its returning.
But the man who lifts the cup tonight is not the man who lifted it on that first page.
In writing my way through memory, I have quietly become the thing that I set out to describe.
I once demanded that the past give itself back to me, whole and unchanged, on my own terms.
I know now that the past keeps nothing back; it simply waits to be transfigured, never merely returned.
Time is not lost, as I long feared, nor is it truly regained in the way I once wished.
It is remade, here, on the page, and remaking is the only regaining a is ever offered.
The madeleine and the clock, my two old adversaries, have at last made their peace within me.
The clock measures a time that flees; the madeleine restores a time that no clock could ever hold.
Between them stands the writer, taking the fugitive hour and pressing it into an enduring, shape.
What the clock lets fall, the sentence catches; what the senses raise, the sentence steadies and keeps.
I no longer grieve that I cannot stop the river, for I have learned the deeper art of carrying its water.
Every remembered afternoon I have written down is now more permanent than the afternoon itself ever was.
The lived day was fugitive; the made day, imperfect and faithful, has entered a quieter kind of .
This is the that art, and only art, can wring from the merciless passage of the hours.
Not the arrest of time, which is death, but its transfiguration into something time can no longer .
I set out to recover lost time and found, instead, that time is made, not found, by the loving mind.
The self I feared had scattered across the years is gathered, at last, into the act of this telling.
I am, on these pages, every age at once, the child and the old man reconciled in a single voice.
The circle closes: the scent that opened the first door has led me back to where I always stood.
Yet the one who returns is larger than the one who left, enlarged by all he paused to write.
, I understand at last, lies not in halting time but in fully inhabiting its passage.
The finite hour, embraced and inscribed, becomes a small window opening onto something that does not end.
I do not defeat death by writing; I simply live, more fully awake, in the time that is given me.
And that fuller waking, poured into words, is the nearest thing to a hand can shape.
So the lime blossom rises, and the clock ticks on, and between them my pen keeps its patient .
The past is not behind me now but beneath me, a ground I stand on and, standing, into now.