Note a rhythm in your life? The what-goes-around-comes-around cycle? The periodicity of feelings and even similar events in places infused with your personal deja vu?
In “The Rhythm of Life,”* Alice Meynell describes the periodicity as “what is just upon its flight of farewell is already on its long path of return.” By experience we know, in her terms, the “tides of the mind,” a personal cycle. For each of us, the return of feelings, thoughts, and habits is a reminder of our continued Self. Our own periodicity is evidence and outline for a recognizable character.
And one of the drivers of our mind’s tides is place. In another of her essays** she writes:
"Spirit of place! It is for this we travel, to surprise its subtlety; and where it is a strong and dominant angel, that place, seen once, abides entire in the memory with all its own accidents, its habits, its breath, its name. It is recalled all a lifetime, having been perceived a week, and is not scattered but abides, one living body of remembrance. The untravelled spirit of place--not to be pursued, for it never flies, but always to be discovered, never absent, without variation--lurks in the by- ways and rules over the towers, indestructible, an indescribable unity. It awaits us always in its ancient and eager freshness."
The tides of our mind ebb and flow under the influence of a memory moon whose phases periodically drown and expose the elements of our character. There is ironically an unmeasured measure of our lives. We know in deju vu that we have somehow experienced what we now experience, but we never keep a strict accounting of its appearance in our lives. Meynell writes that “in all the diaries of students of the interior world [assume she means personal psychology], there have never come to light the records of the Kepler of such cycles.” We don’t keep strict track of the repetitive orbits of character. We simply have a vague notion punctuated by the returning tide in a metric over which we have no control.
Meynell says,
"If life is not always poetical, it is at least metrical. Periodicity rules over the mental experience of man, according to the path of the orbit of his thoughts. Distances are not gauged, ellipses not measured, velocities not ascertained, times not known. Nevertheless, the recurrence is sure. What the mind suffered last week, or last year, it does not suffer now; but it will suffer again next week or next year. Happiness is not a matter of events; it depends upon the tides of the mind."
Does this apply to your own life? Are you happy by virtue of unpredictable but inevitable tides in your mind? Can you identify a periodicity in your makeup? And one more question: What role does the “spirit of place” play in either your happiness or suffering?
*”The Rhythm of Life” in Essays (2014), https://ia902302.us.archive.org/4/items/essays01434gut/1434.txt
** “The Spirit of Place”
In “The Rhythm of Life,”* Alice Meynell describes the periodicity as “what is just upon its flight of farewell is already on its long path of return.” By experience we know, in her terms, the “tides of the mind,” a personal cycle. For each of us, the return of feelings, thoughts, and habits is a reminder of our continued Self. Our own periodicity is evidence and outline for a recognizable character.
And one of the drivers of our mind’s tides is place. In another of her essays** she writes:
"Spirit of place! It is for this we travel, to surprise its subtlety; and where it is a strong and dominant angel, that place, seen once, abides entire in the memory with all its own accidents, its habits, its breath, its name. It is recalled all a lifetime, having been perceived a week, and is not scattered but abides, one living body of remembrance. The untravelled spirit of place--not to be pursued, for it never flies, but always to be discovered, never absent, without variation--lurks in the by- ways and rules over the towers, indestructible, an indescribable unity. It awaits us always in its ancient and eager freshness."
The tides of our mind ebb and flow under the influence of a memory moon whose phases periodically drown and expose the elements of our character. There is ironically an unmeasured measure of our lives. We know in deju vu that we have somehow experienced what we now experience, but we never keep a strict accounting of its appearance in our lives. Meynell writes that “in all the diaries of students of the interior world [assume she means personal psychology], there have never come to light the records of the Kepler of such cycles.” We don’t keep strict track of the repetitive orbits of character. We simply have a vague notion punctuated by the returning tide in a metric over which we have no control.
Meynell says,
"If life is not always poetical, it is at least metrical. Periodicity rules over the mental experience of man, according to the path of the orbit of his thoughts. Distances are not gauged, ellipses not measured, velocities not ascertained, times not known. Nevertheless, the recurrence is sure. What the mind suffered last week, or last year, it does not suffer now; but it will suffer again next week or next year. Happiness is not a matter of events; it depends upon the tides of the mind."
Does this apply to your own life? Are you happy by virtue of unpredictable but inevitable tides in your mind? Can you identify a periodicity in your makeup? And one more question: What role does the “spirit of place” play in either your happiness or suffering?
*”The Rhythm of Life” in Essays (2014), https://ia902302.us.archive.org/4/items/essays01434gut/1434.txt
** “The Spirit of Place”
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