2024 - 002 Musing | Back Then the Monster Had No Name
Last Thursday I was inside a train car, catching my breath after climbing the stair to reach the platform. I was also anticipating for this train to emerge out of the tunnel and trace the viaduct.
The view is not Instagram spectacular, but I like the sudden transition. I love this image of a powerful, speeding machine rising out of the earth. I love the open sky that is waiting. On the left side of the track, beyond the road that parallels the rail, there is a sprawling public park. Residential towers flank it on both sides. It’s pretty open above the greenery, and for a brief moment one can watch the clouds unhindered.
But this post is really about nostalgia. While admiring the view I suddenly remembered the panic I would had whenever the teacher would require the class to write an autobiographical essay. If my memory served me correctly, it started when I was a third grader. It occurred every year until high school. For some reason, teachers love autobiographical essays. And their standard template for autobiographical essay always included a bit of information about your parents—that means one had to tell too what they do for a living. I didn’t know how to write the fact that my father was jobless and he just stayed at home. I also didn’t know how to say my mother was seamstress working at home.
Back then I have no word for panic. It was just a nameless shadow. Only this last fateful Thursday, year 2024, I came to realize the feeling I was feeling was the emotion of shame.
In the memoir My Invented Country, Isabel Allende wrote about nostalgia being a slow dance in large circle.
"But that's how nostalgia is: a slow dance in a large circle. Memories don't organize themselves chronologically, they're like smoke, changing, ephemeral, and if they're not written down they fade into oblivion."
In the same work, Allende noted that there was some kind of danger writing memoirs, because Minotaur lies in wait in the turns and corners of the labyrinth of memories.
I guess I just found one. And I’m playing a little staring game with it for now. Damn.
However I know it is not a losing game because I can take comfort with these words from Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway:
“Ah well, so be it. The compensation of growing old, Peter Walsh thought, coming out of Regent’s Park, and holding his hat in hand, was simply this; that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained — at last! — the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence — the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.”