Middle Oil

March 5, 2007 by Susan Hansell.

Who was it that said it was Proust who said that the best years of life are the lost years, the years lost in living, the years spent living without memories getting in the way of the lived experience? Somehow, the lost years are lived out of time, yet they become Time itself for the individual, when she stops living in lost time/s, and starts creating Memories.

As soon as living-time becomes composed of memory-time/s, the individual is no longer living. She has lost the lost-years of “youth”; she is doomed to live only remembering those years that she then comes to believe were the best years of her life, which fact she didn’t know or appreciate at the time, because she was absorbed (without knowing she was absorbed) by living Out of Time, in an experiential immediacy that she has Lost.

The moment she understands that the Lost Years are gone corresponds to the exact point she realizes that her existence is now made up of memories as much or more so than it is made up of the vivid, visceral experiences of life that go into making its memories, which must be what middle-age is… Not bad, for not reading Proust, right?

Hell, I think I Lost all of February, because I can’t remember a damn thing that happened last month!

Perhaps all is not lost, then, in my case, or maybe I’ve bounded beyond the cognizance of my lost years, to a more old-aged forgiving and forgetting?

But what I really want to know is, does this headache mean I’ve been talking on my cell phone too long? And, do I have a brain tumor? You decide!

Happy St. Patrick’s Day, everybody.

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