The world of late antiquity

(Image by Pelligrin)

(Tamas Dezso, Romania)

~

An inventory of things lost:

I remember lunch, at the Old Dutch pancake restaurant on New Oxford Street, with a pretty Cambridge girl, who went on to achieve great things. Oh well, the pancakes were very good.

The colouration of your hands doesn't bother you any more. The sun has bronzed them evenly at least and I still have my knees to remind me of my childhood: a scar from a fall. I remember it well.

My hair is thinning at an alarming rate, so that I look like an bemused Koala Bear if I grow it long. A friend says I look like Gene Wilder. It must be my sad eyes, or some ancient Jewish strain.

The lines on my fingers are deepening and becoming more pronounced no matter how much I avoid them. Yesterday I met someone who said he had a unique hand for he doesn't have a 'heart line' on the palm of his hand. Everyone turned to examine their own, for we rarely care about the fate of other people. It turned out that three other people in the room were missing that line.

I walk around with a green ink mark on my thumb. It will wear off in time. Even the mark on the obscure document will eventually wear thin and be reduced to green powder.

Little r shouted at me: Why don't you go from here! Leave this house.

"But it is my house!, " I said sternly.

She started crying, which was a bit unfair. I hope she isn't a Communist.

Something is lost in tears. The history of the world could be written silently of all that has been lost.

~~~

You sit in a large oblong room, brilliant white walls punctuated by beautiful round windows. You look out to the sea. Twenty five years ago there was only desert here; desert and bedouin with no history and no memory (except, perhaps, some distant folklore or tribal storytelling). There were pirates and smugglers, an inward looking people for whom the shadows of the stars were enough of a mystery for a lifetime. What can be lost in such a world? 

Breakfast with Francis, an old Indian hand. charming conversation-mostly cricket and Peter Brown. A good selection of food, Francis?

"Frankly, I find it all obscene!"

Which was a shame because it meant I couldn't get a second Danish pastry without going down in his estimation.

~~~

To lose track of what one was saying. To lose track of what one was stalking. The lack of orientation in the Orient. My heart sinks day by day for no reason, until it enters a reverie and remembers all that is lost.

: Language, grammar, old letters (aerograms), a simple watch with a grey face and silver hands, newspaper clippings, time,..

Do I only think
I lost a river, culture, speech, sense of first space
and the right place?
Now, Where do you come from?
strangers ask.
Originally?
And I hesitate.

--Carol Ann Duffy.