An Experience Not Quite Memory

Also: The many uses of “like,” the appeal of the Dutch Masters, burying the dead in rural Ireland, and more.

My wife and I are spending the summer with family in Switzerland and Austria. We arrived in Geneva on Wednesday morning and took the train to Neuchâtel, where my wife’s parents (both in their 70s) picked us up and drove us to their small town on the other side of the lake. They live in an old farmhouse in town. Back in the day, half of the house was a barn for the animals and the other half was for the family. Today, the barn side has a studio and a workshop space for my wife’s father.

I worked for a year at the small university in Neuchâtel twenty years ago, and whenever I visit, I always remember the time I picked up the American poet Wesley McNair at the train station and walked him down to the university campus for a reading. The university is right on the lake, but the rest of the town is on a steep hill.

I don’t know if Neuchâtel has changed much in twenty years since I haven’t spent much time in town since we arrived. I passed through on Friday on a bike ride around the lake. It was crowded—more crowded than before—with a handful of women wearing hijabs, which one rarely saw twenty years ago. Otherwise, it seemed mostly the same.

It is always a little bit uncanny to return to a place you have lived after a period of several years. Robert Rehder captures something of the feeling in his poem “Where and Now,” which appears in his posthumous collection I’m Back and Still Returning:

Moments, days, that seem to belong

To another story,

The Salute, San Giorgio Maggiore,

Plates bound into the wrong book –

The experience is not quite memory

And seems like only yesterday.

The steps go down into the water.

A map folds out from the back of the book

Of a different country

From the one in the narrative

And the difficulty of making

Any clear statement.

Green water lapping at the quay.

Everything is between.

The present returns as the past.

Words have more than one meaning.

Visiting old stomping grounds does feel like an experience “that is not quite memory” where the present “returns to the past,” doesn’t it?  Perhaps you have had this experience before.

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Speaking of words that “have more than one meaning,” Wilfred McClay writes about the many uses of “like” in The Hedgehog Review: “Noun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction, suffix: It can do them all without breaking a sweat. And its meanings tend to have something pleasant in common. There is nearly always a mild gravitational pull at work in the word, an inclination toward togetherness either of affection or resemblance. I ‘like’ you because you are ‘like’ my brother. Like tends to be a token of sunny optimism and harmony, the byword of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Yet it is a respectable word that knows its limits and chastely observes them, eschewing the Sturm und Drang and ambiguous risks of its more passionate cousins.”