The sin of reminiscence

We are obsessed with beauty to the point where we blind ourselves and forget that love has nothing to do with beauty. Beauty is not a predisposition of love: memories and time and letters and displays and asking what one’s favorite meal to cook them it for dinner create beauty. Beauty is a finite thing, memories are not. 

It is spiritual vanity and overreaching to hope to enchain the baffling and momentous movements of your memories yet we do it all the time. Every moment of the present is just rushing into its fate into the past. Nevertheless, your past is not a blurring rush of memory, it is a silent forest in which all the trees are humans, rooted, breathing, sustaining an ax, or simply withering away. To think of the past as a series of agreements with others to allow others to make an everlasting claim on each other is unreal yet it also becomes a radical question. It is the way society understands the flow of life, the rules it has made for human collisions that become our biographies. It becomes a question incapable and beyond an answer.