"Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are more hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years. And great fatigue followed by a good night's rest can to a certain extent help us to do so. For in order to make us descend into the most subterranean galleries of sleep, where no reflextion from overnight, no gleam of memory comes to light up the interior monologue - if the latter does not itself cease - fatigue followed by rest will so thoroughly turn over the soil and penetrate the bedrock of our bodies that we discover down there, where our muscles plunge and twist in their ramifications and breathe in new life, the garden where we played in our childhood. There is no need to travel in order to see it again; we must dig down inward to discover it. What once covered the earth is no longer above but beneath it; a mere excursion does not suffice for a visit to the dead city: excavation is necessary also. But we shall see how certain fugitive and fortuitous impressions carry us back even more effectively to the past, with a more delicate precision, with a more light-winged, more immaterial, more headlong, more unerring, more immortal flight, than these organic dislocations."
Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, pp. 89-90
Marcus Aurelius wrote, "Let it be clear to you that the peace of green fields can always be yours, in this, that, or any other spot; and nothing is any different here from what it would be either up in the hills, or down by the sea, or wherever you are." I think my default setting for reflection is always the Meditations, and, even though I've read it several times, I'm tempted, if I live long enough to get through Proust, to tackle My Year With Marcus Aurelius next. What both men are getting out here is that as much as we strive, and often head outward at great distance (and, again, I'm the most guilty party here), the peace of green fields is always within us; that is, that calm, quiet place is always waiting inside of us, if we just have the patience and common sense to dig. Having said that, Proust, and to a much more imbecilic degree, me, has spoken of the need to change your environment, physical and intellectual and emotional.I don't really think this is a contradiction, because jolting ourselves by seeing the world anew causes us to see ourselves anew, and part of that process is a journey inwards. It seems to me that the key, per usual, is to maintain that sense of reflection and moderation and balance about why you're going on the journey. This is clearly watered-down Plato (or Campbell) but every journey outward is a journey inward. What you find out in the broader world won't change you, but your perception of what you find out in the broader world will change you, and your bringing that potentiality with you. What is essential, Proust reminds us, is that "excavation is necessary also."
Oddly, when I did a quick search for - Marcus Aurelius peace of green fields - to make sure that I had the quote correct (my copy of Meditations is at my office), one of the first choices was my own blog. I suppose after a thousand posts it's not surprising that I forget what I wrote, which means I might theoretically also forget where I had been (although not the trip to Salalah), which is why we write blogs and why I'm reading and reflecting upon Remembrance of Things Past.
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