Brain Food #528
Memory, music, and time travel
Thoughts of the day
The curse of remembering may bring joy, when looking back on happy memories, but it also carries an inevitable amount of pain with it, the pain being amplified the further the memory stretches back. Science fiction often deals with the topic of time travel, providing glimpses of the future by imagining what is yet to happen. Yet, the plot of stories that include time travel generally involves characters not travelling to the future to discover how it is, but travelling back in time to unravel and undo situations that could set them on a different path.
Philip Larkin, in his poem Reference Back, recalls a moment with his mother after listening to a record that reminds him of their time at home together. There is guilt and regret: he describes the time spent with his mother as ‘unsatisfactory’, perhaps even taking it for granted.
Though there is some bitterness in the poem, a more hidden message resonates: that our actions and experiences today will, one day, be our past. What we will remember is the result of our choices.
As the last month of 2020 begins, we, too, are tempted to start travelling in time; looking back on what could have been, and thinking about the future and what it might bring. We can start by avoiding the poet’s mistakes: to not waste our time at home, to look forward to things with each other, to seek satisfaction in every moment.
Reference Back
by Philip Larkin
That was a pretty one, I heard you call
From the unsatisfactory hall
To the unsatisfactory room where I
Played record after record, idly,
Wasting my time at home, that you
Looked so much forward to.
Oliver’s Riverside Blues, it was. And now
I shall, I suppose, always remember how
The flock of notes those antique Negroes blew
Our of Chicago air into
A huge remembering pre-electric horn
The year after I was born
Three decades later made this sudden bridge
From your unsatisfactory age
To my unsatisfactory prime.
Truly, though our element is time,
We’re not suited to the long perspectives
Open at each instant of our lives.
They link us to our losses: worse,
They show us what we have as it once was,
Blindingly undiminished, just as though
By acting differently we could have kept it so.
And if you are curious about Olivers’ Riverside Blues:
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