On a warm December afternoon the odd forsythia blossom caught my eye. It was as if it sang like a golden ghost among the brown leaves of December. My dog had her own ideas of where we should walk tonight and she lead me through a field where earlier I had heard gun shots. I whistled odd tunes so that any hunter would know I was a human in a yellow vest with a happy golden dog not a spooked deer bounding across the hills. Forgotten melodies came back to me as twilight deepened. A mix of Jazz riffs my parents listened to when I was a kid and Elizabethan recorder music I memorized in middle school sprouted like weedy thoughts.
My soul has been
haunted by something like those forgotten melodies that come back to us
at twilight, during those slow hours in which memory, like a ghost among
ruins, stalks our thoughts.
--Gustave Flaubert, from a letter to Louise Colet, The Letters of Gustave Flaubert: 1830-1857, translated by Francis Steegmuller (Belknap Press, 1980)
My soul has been
haunted by something like those forgotten melodies that come back to us
at twilight, during those slow hours in which memory, like a ghost among
ruins, stalks our thoughts.--Gustave Flaubert, from a letter to Louise Colet, The Letters of Gustave Flaubert: 1830-1857, translated by Francis Steegmuller (Belknap Press, 1980)
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