and we think we have now found our purpose and meaning and will try to hang onto ‘the feeling’ as long as possible, thinking in the backs of our minds that we will be mindful this time, and do our best not to let the precious fleeting moment or episode change or slip away. In those precious few moments, happy and mentally/innerly/spiritually free; care-free for certain.
It is this–that desire that informs our ongoing struggle or conflict between the real and the dream, between time and eternity, between change and permanence. We ‘catch a glimpse’ as Gatsby did or as did F. Scott’s Fitzgerald’s major influence–Keats–in his poems about the nightingale and Grecian urn. Like the two authors, we also flirt with the dream of eternity and try to hang on to it, when we are briefly lucky, knowing we have found something we have long been seeking, but which will, necessarily and finally, elude us at last.
In the past, I can recall telling others, when immersed in some happy, joyous mutual enterprise or experience, to sa-vour the moment, to look around, to ‘take it all in’, to try to remember details for memory’s sake. Later will come recalled golden moments and dreams in Wordsworthian recollections of joy or tranquillity, as the case may be. To enjoy the peak experiences, the moments of being as the bird or spirit flies.
O, one shall, inevitably return to earth as Keats did in both of the aforementioned reveries; of that, one can be absolutely certain, living in the physical sphere of time, mass, and Nature that we all do. Time and change being our frequent, ‘proper’, contextual conditions in the ongoing processes of Life.
“Man would devour the stars if only he could.”–Rudolf Schroder