Reading Flashbacks...

    There are books I've read from which scenes keep popping up in my mind. Richard Ford's Canada is one of them.  Another is Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses. Why some but not others? I don't know, I guess they just stick in my imagination.  Using today's inclement weather to settle in with some serious reading I finished A Gentleman In Moscow,  Amor Towles, which has been on my list for over a year. Likely this book will be a source of flashbacks in the days to come.
    Surprisingly engaging, full of wit, wisdom and humor, though set in the tragedy that is Russian History, 1905-1954,  much Russian political history slides unobtrusively into the story. For some reason I had not expected the book to be so delightful
   The main character of the book is Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov. The Count, speaking to his adopted daughter, Sofia, about his late sister says,"As a younger man, I used to feel the same way about my sister. Every year that passed, it seemed like a little more of her had slipped away; and I began to fear that one day I would come to forget her altogether. But the truth is: No matter how much time passes, those we have loved never slip away from us entirely." P. 327
    Life is for the living and, as we live forward, some of the immediacy of those who have died will be lost. Indeed, that is much of the pain of life in the land of grief. While on the one hand, the bereaved are called to move on with life, the fading of immediacy is hard to bear.
     Later in the book a mutual friend comes bearing news of another friend's death. The Count has very close friends and a powerful bond with his adopted daughter, Sofia,  but there's a poignancy in the reported death. "But, of course, the Count also wept for himself. For despite his friendships with Marina and Andrey and Emile, despite his love for Anna, despite Sofia---that extraordinary blessing that had struck him from the blue---when Mikhail Fyodorovich Mindich died, there went the last of those who knew him as a younger man. Though, as Katerina had so rightfully observed, at least he remained to remember." P. 374
     "there went the last of those who knew him as a younger man."  So much of grief is the loss of shared history. As we age family members, spouses,  and friends die and each one takes with them their half of the shared history with the bereaved. No one remains who can fill that void because there was no one else who participated in those moments. But "...at least he remained to remember."  So we come back "life is for the living" and in that living bearing the memories.

Takk for alt,

Al