While packing, I unearthed a cache of magazine pages which I'd carefully torn out and saved. It's delightful to flip through them, but I'm left with an odd feeling.
I recognize some as important moments in my visual life (7/11, 7/14, 7/16), others as points which I felt were important to the world or history of fashion (7/21, 7/23), but I no longer retain or even understand the compulsion to horde these things. I'm certainly touched by whatever impetus led me to carefully preserve layouts that I found to be particularly beautiful (7/24, 7/30) by carefully linking together multiple file folders thereby ensuring that the odd-sized pages wouldn't get bent. But I haven't in this manner saved a page from a magazine in years.
I feel rather like Karl Lagerfeld in Valentino: The Last Emperor, running his eyes over a wall of Valentino's intricate gowns, nodding, "I remember that, and that," and then, without a blink, swivelling and gliding coolly away.
I'm anxious about the coolness of this gliding away, about the ease with which I tossed these pages into the recycling bin, because I worry I've lost something-- that I no longer experience the world, or this particular facet of the world, with with the same intensity that I once did. That I may lose all access to intensity. I suppose we all will.
The best discovery: my Masters degree diploma slipped casually in admist these magazine pages. I was strangely comforted to find it just there.
Maybe I was studying these pages. Maybe I've learned them.
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3 comments:
Over the past six months, as I started the process of combining households with my wife, I was struck by the very same emotions over very similar objects and images. Sometimes the catalog of images I'd accumulated - interiors, clothes, etc. - or objects holding the same emotional spot, seemed to indicate the changes.
Oddly, I found my Masters diploma, framed, last night as she and I continued to collaborate on living room decoration. I think we'll be swapping it out for some vintage fabric. Though I'll file the diploma.
I think the gliding away is not a sign of disinterest or a sign of losing something, but instead a gesture that says "I remember that so well and it resonated so deeply that the experience has become intuitive - something that quietly guides every new day." The gliding away is a step toward something new that will have the same rewards down the road. The gliding away is a celebration of the fact that its far more exciting to seek out the new than linger with the old.
You're participating now. Those were the sweet observer days.
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