"Sometimes the desire to be lost again, as long ago, comes over me like a vapor."
—Mary Oliver
In the middle of something or nothing or maybe everything I cannot recall, I was pierced by a memory: a short dirt road warmed by a sunny, unblemished sky, tall oaks on one side, fields on the other. The air is sweet and thick. Cicadas are chirring.
Summer’s end.
I couldn’t stop longing for the impossible, that short sunny road. From Arthur Rimbaud's equally lamenting poetry: “Ah! That life of my childhood, the high road in all weathers….”
There is something between the bars of poetry, memoirs, and pictures—a pattern lacking standard description, a feeling thrown against the backdrop of life. It works your nerves. It is often mentioned that it bears collecting: this deep, aching longing for the impossible. A place we cannot go or return to.
In her most last-published collection of poems and essays bundled and bound by the quest for eternity, the ever-contemplative American poet Mary Oliver wrote that she longed “to be lost again, as long ago.” Her words, compelling but opaque, suggest a need for space. Oliver walked upstream—did she find what she sought?
English poet A. E. Housman, a notable classics professor and less-distinguished poet of longing (he carried a lifelong unrequited love for his heterosexual roommate), took well-paced, lengthy steps marking boundaries where longing could exist, jostling his thoughts and resting his soul. Circling Cambridge University on daily walks, he put the mind's agitation to rest. In periods of acute feeling, such as after his unrequited love moved abroad, Housman's longing spilled over into poetry.
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
From A. E. Housman’s “The Land of Lost Content”
A place we cannot return to is also a place where we can never arrive.
This impossible longing is further embodied in Doris Lessing’s short story “To Room Nineteen.”
Lessing’s heroine quietly, futilely, seeks space for existence. She finds it in a nondescript small hotel: perfect nothingness, anonymity. Lessing won’t tell us what her character does in the room, so complete is the hide.
Ultimately, however, as the title suggests, our heroine is ever traveling, never arriving.
Romantic era poet John Clare, who, like Housman, wrote without affectation but poured his sorrows into verse, gazed on a place forever gone and recalled the feeling in literary precision:
Often did I stop to gaze
On each spot once dear to me
Known mong those rememberd days
Of banishd happy infancy
Often did I view the shade
Where once a nest my eyes did fill
And often markd the place I playd
At ‘roley poley’ down the hill
From John Clare's COLLECTED POEMS
The place we playd…
The French capture this longing in a pitch-perfect phase: Mal du pays.
Homesickness, but more than homesickness, a deep longing for places embedded in time. German contains a similar word, Fernweh, which means “A longing or need to be far away, anywhere but here.” I wonder if that extends to the past.
Time is critical; time prevents us from returning. I stood on my road, and even took a photo. But I will never return to the road as the child who first saw it. I will never return to the road I’ve kept in memory. That road doesn’t exist. The past—what Oliver beautifully termed “as it was long ago”—is no longer.
In her memoirs, a turn around the past as it lays out in memory, novelist Penelope Lively faced the “as it was long ago” with bold honesty:
It is gone, it cannot be recovered. It is swamped, drowned out by adult knowledge. That child self is an alien; I have still some glimmer of what she saw, but her mind is unreachable; I know too much, seventy years on.
Perhaps our burden is to long, yes, but not despair. We might not return or arrive at then and there, but we can always be now and here.
