Several months ago I turned down a job offer at a university in Spearfish, South Dakota. Spearfish is a quaint town in the northern Black Hills, lodged between a mountain on one side and a canyon on the other. I have fond memories of hiking that mountain, “Crow Peak,” in the rain with a friend one summer, and of puffing cheap Swisher Sweets around a campfire in the canyon at night, watching our smoke drift up to the infinite stars…
I’ve visited and roamed the Black Hills at least once every summer for the past decade, and I prefer its subtle geographic glories to anywhere in the state—and most places in the Midwest. Yet, after weeks of painful deliberation, after all but packing our bags and moving west, my wife and I decided to forgo this opportunity to make the Hills our home. We’re still relatively young, but I knew what the decision really meant: we will never make the Hills our home.
Okay, I realize that sounds overdramatic, but that’s how it felt in the moment. It’s true another opportunity could crop up again. Who knows. Still, the tough reality is, some places cannot be returned to, some experiences relived. In those instances (and let’s be honest, that’s most instances) all we get are memories.
Good Ol’ Tintern Abbey
I recently re-read William Wordsworth’s great poem “Tintern Abbey.” In a funny way I felt like he was attempting to console me about my tragic decision to forsake a new life in the Hills. The poem’s reasoning goes something like this: when we are prevented from revisiting those places which matter most to us, the mere memory of such places can bring comfort in the monotony of daily life. For Wordsworth, it was a particular view from the banks of the River Wye, which he frequented as a younger man, “rolling from their mountain-springs / With a sweet inland murmur” (3-4).
Although it has been five years since his last visit, he recollects in the poem how inward images and memories of the scene have nourished him during the intervening period with “sensations sweet” (28) and a “presence that disturbs me with the joy / Of elevated thoughts” (95-96).
Throughout the poem, memory not only connects the past and the future but serves as the channel for fresh encounters with the sublime in the present, whereby the mind appears to transcend its physical limitations to “see into the life of things” (49). We tend to see things differently from retrospect. When our bodies cannot travel to some place, our minds can take us there.
When memories ache
Now, I must confess I find this to be a difficult notion. That memory in some sense tethers our minds to the past seems obvious enough; to suggest that memory can substitute for the-thing-itself requires a bit more: either a metaphysic foreign to me or a degree of self-deception. (“Tintern Abbey” does read like coping at times.) Like the poem’s speaker, I can recall the “aching joys” (85) of cliff diving into Horse Thief Lake or watching snow silently spackle the hills around Pactola Reservoir. But these memories could never substitute for the places or experiences themselves, for the sensation of my entire body submerged in the icy water. This is because memory cries for consummation, reunion, communion. If communion is not likely or even possible, however, memory’s “lovely forms” morph into aching sorrows that haunt the mansions of our minds.
I need to say that I take much delight in “Tintern Abbey.” Of course the image of the romantic poet gallivanting through the woods wants for originality these days (unless you’re Mary Oliver). Still, I couldn’t resist seeing myself in Wordsworth’s lines about his younger self, “more like a man / Flying from something that he dreads, than one / Who sought the thing he loved” (71–73). Much of my own poetry in the last year has wrestled with the role of memory, how it serves and deceives us, but almost always I am writing from memory. And maybe that’s what Wordsworth’s poem is really about: letting the world impress itself on our minds and—before yet another day of work or during a lunch break—drawing upon its storehouse of images to inspire something new. Certainly, that practice has sustained me through many bleak hours.
And yet, and yet: when we write about times, places, and people gone-by, how will our words escape sentimentality or the ultimate tragedy of loss? How can I now write about the Black Hills except as a place which was almost my home, a place with which enduring communion has been cut off?
In my view, one would need a robust doctrine of the “last things” to point memory beyond itself and toward the horizon of the New Creation. Such a doctrine does not spare us from the pangs of loss in this life; it does, however, assure us that loss does not have the final word. If history can be redeemed, so can memory.