“We can never go back,” bell hooks wrote in her moving reckoning with love. “We can go forward. We can find the love our hearts long for, but not until we let go grief about the love we lost long ago.”

And yet we do go back, over and over. The tragic flaw of our species is the price we pay for the mind’s magnificent ability to move in time: the superpower of prospection that makes us capable of making a plan and making a promise comes bundled with the singular suffering of retrospection: the remorse, the regret, the past romanticized and voided of its own consequence.

It is seductive, this selective time travel. The perfect weekend with the imperfect lover whose ineptitude at love you didn’t yet know would break your heart. The languid summer just before the diagnosis, the disaster, the death. The time you were ten pounds lighter and ten choices freer and ten mistakes less marred in the mirror of the mind. Over and over, the hand of memory reaches back, grasps for the bygone moment when life was simpler or brighter or more redolent with aliveness, forgetting that the only thing for the keeping is the naked now, vulnerable as a newborn, total as eternity.

The great challenge, the great triumph, is to make of memory an instrument of presence. That is what Diane Seuss offers in her splendid poem “Weeds,” found in her altogether vivifying collection Modern Poetry (public library).

WEEDS
by Diane Seuss

The danger of memory is going

to it for respite. Respite risks

entrapment. Don’t debauch

yourself by living

in some former version of yourself

that was more or less naked. Maybe

it felt better then, but you were

not better. You were smaller, as the rain

gauge must fill to the brim

with its full portion of suffering.

What can memory be in these terrible times?

Only instruction. Not a dwelling.

Or if you must dwell:

The sweet smell of weeds then.

The sweet smell of weeds now.

An endurance. A standoff. A rest.

Couple with Virginia Woolf on the nature of memory and Oliver Sacks on the necessity of forgetting, then revisit George Saunders on how to live an uregretting life.