“All of us, I believe, carry about in our heads places and landscapes we shall never forget because we have experienced such intensity of life there: places where, like the child that 'feels its life in every limb' in Wordsworth's poem 'We are seven,’ our eyes have opened wider, and all our senses have somehow heightened. By way of returning the compliment, we accord these places that have given us such joy a special place in our memories and imaginations. They live on in us, wherever we may be, however far from them.”—Roger Deakin, Notes from Walnut Tree Farm
So many places are like that for me—from Santa Fe (and Española with its cherry tree and murky swimming pool with little frog) to Lake Como to the Writing Mills on Mallorca to the high monastery on the St. Bernard Pass; and all those others that live on in me unnamed.
image: Gustav Klimt, Farmhouse at Krammer
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I have never held any particular attachment to the places I visited. Whenever it was time to leave, going back home to my mountains and hills, my creek and pebbles, was the sweetest of all trips. Until I travelled to Hong Kong. It pierced through me, aided by a particularly special and meaningful context. So far, that was the only place I left tears welling up my eyes.
ReplyDeleteAh, but home, when loved, is one of the intensest places.
ReplyDeleteAnd maybe Hong Kong now is a new home of your heart, a previously unvisited home.