In Search of Lost Time

The last two Thursday evenings have been spent at a lecture series at Brown University in Providence. The writings of Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf were the topics. Proust’s past came out of a teacup, and I had a similar sensation when the professor walked into the room, handsome, debonair, dressed in black, taking me back to my undergraduate days years ago when Dr. M. walked into the room and spoke a few words in his thrilling voice. It is easy, so easy to fall in love with thoughtful, lucid mind and a voice that talks about memory, and beauty and feeling and poetry. Much more difficult to fall in love with a mind that talks about bits and bites and registers and the stack. It’s not even a contest.
Once upon a time I might have been a scholar, but I turned my back on all that, and occasionally there are regrets, faint ones to be sure, and memories of the days when I fell in love with beautiful minds. One of the good things about maturity is that one can say, I might have been that but now I am this and accept it without more than a pang of regret. I might have had a beautiful mind, but now it’s concerned with direct sales of catalog and web site and writing commercial fiction and finding an agent and none of these things, however meritorious, are the least bit beautiful.
However, my garden is beautiful (or will be in three months) and the cows are lovely, and the act of writing, even commercial fiction, is satisfying and challenging, and sometimes, in a lecture hall or at a concert, I can for an evening have a beautiful mind.