Remembering the past: do you find it sad or satisfying to look backward? You’re probably thinking, “Obviously, that depends on what’s being remembered -happy or sad times”. But is that the only view? Is there a way in which memory itself -the very FACT of the past- always shadows life in the present?
My past has been something that makes me feel satisfied, of course I can find moments that I would like to change, but those have taught me many lessons for life. The past is full of pleasant and unpleasant situations. The pleasant moments in my life will be in my mind will be there forever and I will always remember those moments as incredible experiences.
In the other hand, the unpleasant situation are the ones that I wouldn’t like to remember, because were moments in which I felt really bad, but I know that those moments are not in my mind as a remembrance, they stay there as lessons for the future.
I think that I don’t live in the shadows of the past, I think that everyday’s life is the best thing that I can have and is the consequence of positive and negative decisions I took in the past, even though that the past makes the person who I am. Many people live frustrated because they want to revive many moments that they had lived and that’s the reason they don’t enjoy the present. Once I heard a quote that says that people waste their life and don’t live the present because they live remembering the past or planning the future.
Therefore, I do think that I have to have a plan for the future, and also dreams and goal. I also know that I have to remember good things from the past and learn from the bad ones. The most important thing in life is that I have to live the present with all the energies I have and totally enjoy it.
How can tears be “idle” -can you cry without knowing why?
It all comes from somewhere, and that somewhere is your subconscious mind. Since you cannot get access to your subconscious most of the time it just feels as if there is no real cause. Well when you cry and you have no reason it’s because you’re not thinking of what is causing it but your heart feels it.
What do you think the “divine despair” is in line 2? Could you relate it to Adam and Eve’s fall in Genesis -would that story explain the speaker’s existential sadness?
The author talks about how the tears come to him because of the happy thoughts he is thinking about. He cries these tears while “looking on the happy autumn-fields.” At first, it seems strange that looking at something happy would form tears, but the fact that these are fields of autumn suggests that they are produced by the memories of a spring and summer that have vanished, leaving the poet with nothing to look forward to except the dark and cold of winter. He thinks that tears are the product of a “divine despair,” suggesting that they do indeed have a source: they rise in the heart and stem from a profoundly deep and universal cause.
Does the contradiction in the phrase “Death in Life” (line 20) make sense to you? Explain. What is your response to this line? Have you ever felt this way?
The author declares the past to be dear, sweet, deep, and wild. It is as dear as the memory of the kisses of one who is now dead, and it is as sweet as those kisses that we imagine ourselves bestowing on lovers who actually have loyalties to others. So, too, is the past as deep as “first love” and as wild as the regret that usually follows this experience. The speaker concludes that the past is a “Death in Life.”
