To Remember Is to Live Again | Buddhadeva Bose | Granta Magazine

From An Acre of Green Grass and Other English Writings of Buddhadeva Bose:

Miller and I parted for the night at the door of the log-cabin which he had rented for me to sleep in. Near it was the Pacific Bend, famed for its hot sulphur springs. In a glimmering moonlight the ocean was faintly visible. I gave the landscape a few minutes before turning in. A thin moon hanging over the sea and flattened by the sea fogs; above it, towering darkness reaching up to the zenith, perforated by stars. My cabin lay in the shadow of a huge hill of which I could make out but the barest outline. There was a rippling breeze, not a cat in sight, not a whirr of a passing automobile; only a faint swish of the ocean and the breathing of the voiceless trees. As I switched off the light, the darkness grew as black as a mother’s womb and in my ears the silence began to buzz like cicadas. I had an intense feeling of the reality of the night – deep, dark, mysterious, overwhelming, a flood on which my consciousness was rocked, not to slumber, but back and forth between memories of loves and friendships, from one dream to another, dreams of happiness found and lost, and regained but to be lost again. What I felt was in fact an incipient poem, faintly tapping at my door, like a waif left out in the cold. I wanted to let it in; a first line formed itself in my mind, a vague shape, shadowy stanzas, ghostly rhythms, but before I could get any further the night itself was obliterated in sleep. More here.

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