Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
So began T S Eliot in Burnt Norton.
We've looked at nostalgia. Now I think further, I hang onto nostalgic thoughts precisely because, in some corner of my mind, they remain a possibility.
But that is abstract. I cannot turn the clock back, neither to a younger self nor to past political and economic circumstances. A few memorable years were granted me because I chose to travel to a place in flux at just the time when it was viable to offer riding holidays. Prices were affordable, political momentum to sweep away the old ways had not yet gathered momentum and the economy was yet to slump.
The choice was to do those things for a few years, or not to have done them at all.
Well, better to have gained those experiences and grown through them.
I took a chance and, for a few years, fortune granted me a few favours. Brashly I slipped into the land of speculation and, for a little while, a potent combination of optimism, audacity and hard work paid off.
Peaches in the summertime
Apples in the fall
If I can't have you all the time
I won't have none at all.
That's from Gillian Welch's Wayside / Back in time from her haunting The Harrow and the Harvest - a lovely album that I find myself playing often. It's a fine optimistic sentiment in the song, of course, but in my exile "having it all" wasn't an option. It was something or nothing, and accept that the place was in flux. The current cast me into calm water for a while, then snatched me away and into the rapids again.
So, away from the world of speculation! That's a mirage laughing in our faces as it raises false hopes, a Fata Morgana determined to pervert the view, a Wil o'The Wisp conspiring to lead the traveller astray.
To be fair, that album explores the self-destructive downward spiral that careless poeple can get into. I'd have entered that terrain had I clung onto a passing dream out there in Transylvania. A fast-changing place waits for no laggard. Nor was there a safety net in that place. Sad songs are written about folly, and I'd have earned myself a few tragic verses had I persevered beyond the point of no return. More nostalgia than common sense, a little too much dreaming and the wolves would have devoured us.
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