TRANSITIONS (weeks 12, 21, 40) GLOBAL EMOTION THOUGHT ACTION Renewal Curiosity Inquisitiveness – The Religious Quest Investigation – Experimentation Beginning, Ending; Growing, Declining Arriving, Leaving, etc. Redeeming Awakening Insight Distinctions Incisiveness Novelty Play, Playfulness Blossoming, Extending Rebirth Soul Meditation Transcending Ego Flow Spirit Exuberance
Value for Saturday of Week 53 in the season of Harvest and Celebration
Remembering
By remembering, we return to the meaning in our past. We get our sense of identity from our memories.
- We may never pass this way again. [Title of a song by Seals and Crofts]
- Grief starts to become indulgent, and it doesn’t serve anyone, and it’s painful. But if you transform it into remembrance, then you’re magnifying the person you lost and also giving something of that person to other people, so they can experience something of that person. [Patti Smith]
- Melody is a form of remembrance. It must have a quality of inevitability in our ears. [Gian Carlo Menotti]
Only a special work of art can avoid becoming cliche with overuse. The song “Auld Lang Syne” meets this test as well as any. The lyrics are those of a poem by the great Scottish poet Robert Burns.
“Memory is the process of retaining of knowledge over a period for the function of affecting future actions. It can be divided into declarative and procedural types.Memory is the process of retaining of knowledge over a period for the function of affecting future actions. It can be divided into declarative and procedural types.” “The formation of long-term memories is a function necessary for an adaptive survival.”
“Long-term memory is achieved through a consolidation process where structural and molecular changes integrate information into a stable memory. However, environmental conditions constantly change, and organisms must adapt their behavior by updating their memories, providing dynamic flexibility for adaptive responses.” “System consolidation models suggest that memories are initially stored in the hippocampus and are gradually consolidated into the neocortex over time. The consolidation process involves a hippocampal-neocortical binding process incorporating newly acquired information into existing cognitive schemata.”
Memory is essential to learning, and to the execution of daily activities. Nostalgic memory adds a component of meaning of the thing(s) remembered.
- “When manipulated in an experimental paradigm, nostalgia increases meaning in life, self-esteem, optimism, and positive affect.”
- “The findings (in one study) suggest that nostalgia could improve emotional well-being by increasing gratitude, but may not alter cognitive well-being.”
- Among members of the Resistance in Ukraine during World War II: “Nostalgia fortified the resistance by strengthening cultural identity, social bonds, attachment to home, and continuity of self. Nostalgic memories counteracted loneliness and supported cognitive-emotional coping during and after the struggle. Integration of present and past was instrumental in accepting personal growth in a new homeland.”
“. . . meaning guides the reconstruction of the past.” “. . . the making of meaning is based on an interplay between memory retrieval and unification operations.”
Remembering and commemorating the past, briefly, serves a useful function. It allows us a catharsis and prepares us to resume our work.
Real
True Narratives
Book narratives:
- Antonia Fraser, Must You Go?: My Life with Harold Pinter (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2010).
- Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything (The Penguin Press, 2011): about a fellow who tried to perfect his memory.
- Elisa Gabbert, The Unreality of Memory and Other Essays (FSG Originals, 2020): “Gabbert draws masterly portraits of the precise, uncanny affects that govern our psychological relationship to calamity — from survivor’s guilt to survivor’s elation, to the awe and disbelief evoked by spectacles of destruction, to the way we manage anxiety over impending dangers.”
- Susan Minot, Why I Don’t Write and Other Stories (Knopf, 2020): “Minot has always been interested in how the past can flood the present while remaining stubbornly unrecoverable.”
- Janet Malcolm, Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2023): “. . . assembling photographs and vignettes of her family, friends and childhood as an immigrant to America.”
- Jeremy Eichler, Time’s Echo: The Second World War, The Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance (Knopf, 2023): “Not only do we remember music but, just as importantly, 'music also remembers us,' Eichler argues. Against countless attempts to bury the past, music 'possesses a unique and often underappreciated power to burn through history’s cold storage.'”
Technical and Analytical Readings
On nostalgia:
- Tobias Becker & Dylan Trigg, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Nostalgia (Routledge, 2024).
- Clay Routledge, Nostalgia: A Psychological Resource (Routledge, 2016).
- Clay Routledge, Past Forward: How Nostalgia Can Help You Live a More Meaningful Life (Routledge, 2023).
- Nicola Sayers, The Promise of Nostalgia: Reminiscence, Longing and Hope in Contemporary American Culture (Routledge, 2020).
- Michael Hviid Jacobsen, ed., Nostalgia Now: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on the Past in the Present (Routledge, 2020).
- Lawrence Quill, Nostalgia and Political Theory (Routledge, 2024).
- Alastair Bonnett, The Geography of Nostalgia: Global and Local Perspectives on Modernity and Loss (Routledge, 2016).
- Michael Hviid Jacobsen, ed., Intimations of Nostalgia: Multidisciplinary Explorations of an Enduring Emotion (Bristol University Press, 2022)
- Douwe Draaisma, The Nostalgia Factory: Memory, Time and Ageing (Yale University Press, 2013).
- Mark Swislocki, Culinary Nostalgia: Regional Food Culture and the Urban Experience in Shanghai (Stanford University Press, 2009).
- Helmut Illbruck, Nostalgia: Origins and Ends of an Unenlightened Disease (Northwestern University Press, 2012).
- Phoebe Rumsey, Embodied Nostalgia: Early Twentieth Century Social Dance and the Choreographing of Broadway Musical Theatre (Routledge, 2024).
Photographs
Documentary and Educational Films
- Nostalgia for the Light: “a poetic meditation on time and distance” and a nostalgic look at astronomy, an embattled culture and the driest place on Earth
- The Mouth of the Wolf (La Bocca del Lupo), a “melancholy rumination on time, love and decay”
- Memories of Lisbon, “an elegiac meditation on love lost and rediscovered through misted memory”
Imaginary
Fictional Narratives
The winter sun goes down over town and village; on the sea it makes a rosy path, as if the Sacred tread were fresh upon the water. A few more moments, and it sinks, and night comes on, and lights begin to sparkle in the prospect. On the hill-side beyond the shapelessly-diffused town, and in the quiet keeping of the trees that gird the village-steeple, remembrances are cut in stone, planted in common flowers, growing in grass, entwined with lowly brambles around many a mound of earth. In town and village, there are doors and windows closed against the weather, there are flaming logs heaped high, there are joyful faces, there is healthy music of voices. Be all ungentleness and harm excluded from the temples of the Household Gods, but be those remembrances admitted with tender encouragement! They are of the time and all its comforting and peaceful reassurances; and of the history that re-united even upon earth the living and the dead; and of the broad beneficence and goodness that too many men have tried to tear to narrow shreds. [Charles Dickens, “What Christmas Is As We Grow Older” (1851).]
Joyful remembrances:
- Kathryn Forbes, Mama's Bank Account (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1943).
- Frank B. Gilbreth, Jr., and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, Cheaper by the Dozen (T.Y. Crowell Co., 1948).
Regretful remembrances:
- Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending: A Novel (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011): "a mystery of memory and missed opportunity."
Poignant remembrances:
- Tom Barbash, The Dakota Winters: A Novel (Ecco, 2018): “ . . . Barbash has vividly captured the end times feeling of this period in America and has populated his sad and funny tale with a highly engaging mix of real people and fictional characters who take us to its ordained and dreaded finale, Lennon’s death.”
- Niall Williams, This Is Happiness: A Novel (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019): “. . . as full of detours and backward glances as it is of forward motion and — as befits a novel narrated by an old man who comments that ‘as you get toward the end, you revisit the beginning’ — is centrally preoccupied with time itself.”
- Salar Abdoh, Out of Mesopotamia: A Novel (Akashic, 2020): “Saleh, the protagonist, is a journalist embedded with the Iranian-backed militias that have fought against the Islamic State for the better part of a decade. Early on in his story, which toggles between the battlefield and the home front, Saleh finds a volume of Proust’s masterwork, left by a fighter in a ruined building. This text underpins Abdoh’s novel, which is as much a meditation on time and memory as it is a book about war.”
- Charmaine Wilkerson, Black Cake: A Novel (Ballantine Books, 2022): a woman leaves a note in her freezer, for her adult children, next to a piece of her black cake. The note says, “‘I want you to sit down together and share the cake when the time is right. You’ll know when.'”
Transformative remembrances:
- Bridget Collins, The Binding: A Novel (William Morrow/HarperCollins Publishers, 2019): “ . . . the experience of memory returning, a rush of recollection that can change the whole world, if only for one person at a time — or sometimes two.”
Poetry
During that summer
When unicorns were still possible;
When the purpose of knees
Was to be skinned;
When shiny horse chestnuts
(Hollowed out
Fitted with straws
Crammed with tobacco
Stolen from butts
In family ashtrays)
Were puffed in green lizard silence
While straddling thick branches
Far above and away
From the softening effects
Of civilization;
During that summer--
Which may never have been at all;
But which has become more real
Than the one that was--
Watermelons ruled.
Thick imperial slices
Melting frigidly on sun-parched tongues
Dribbling from chins;
Leaving the best part,
The black bullet seeds,
To be spit out in rapid fire
Against the wall
Against the wind
Against each other;
And when the ammunition was spent,
There was always another bite:
It was a summer of limitless bites,
Of hungers quickly felt
And quickly forgotten
With the next careless gorging.
The bites are fewer now.
Each one is savored lingeringly,
Swallowed reluctantly.
But in a jar put up by Felicity,
The summer which maybe never was
Has been captured and preserved.
And when we unscrew the lid
And slice off a piece
And let it linger on our tongue:
Unicorns become possible again.
[John Tobias, “Reflections On a Gift of Watermelon Pickle Received from a Friend Called Felicity”.]
Other poems:
- Sara Teasdale, “I Thought of You”
- Billy Collins, “Forgetfulness”
- Maya Angelou, “Remembrance”
- Edgar Lee Masters, “Hare Drummer”
- Seamus Heaney, “Casualty”
- Seamus Heaney, “Clearances”
- H. Lawrence, “Piano”
Music: Composers, artists, and major works
Compositions:
- Robert Schumann, Myrthen, Op. 25 (1840) (approx. 52-63’) (lyrics) (list of recorded performances), is a cycle of 26 songs, which he dedicated to his wife Clara.
- Franz Liszt, Bunte Reihe, Op. 30, S. 484, R 149 (1840) (approx. 62’), is a cycle of 24 short piano pieces
- Paul Hindemith, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd: (A Requiem for those we love) (1946) (approx. 60’) (lyrics) (list of recorded performances), for mezzo-soprano and baritone soloists, chorus, and orchestra, based on the poem by Walt Whitman
- Each movement in Charles Ives, Holidays Symphony, New England Holidays (1919) (approx. 41’) (list of recorded performances) is based on something of the memory that a man has of his boy holidays.
- Leoš Janáček, On an Overgrown Path (Po zarostlém chodníčku), JW8/17 (1908) (approx. 44’) (list of recorded performances)
- Morton Feldman, Triadic Memories (1981) (approx. 60-95’) (list of recorded performances)
- Wolfgang Rihm, Et Lux, for vocal ensemble and string quartet (2009) (approx. 62’): “Into this memory space, voices are prompted to enter, and what went before redefines itself . . .” (Paul Griffiths, from the liner notes to this album)
- Rued Langgaard, Symphony No. 8, “Minder ved Amalienborg” (Memories at Amalienborg), BVN 193 (1926-1928, rev. 1929-1934) (approx. 18-21’)
- Mikhail Glinka, Souvenir d’une nuit d’été à Madrid (1851) (approx. 9-10’)
- Frederick Delius, Over the Hills and Far Away (1897) (approx. 13-14’) (list of recorded performances)
- John Carbon, Time Out of Mind (2001) (approx. 8’)
- Tan Dun, Eight Memories in Watercolor, Op. 1 (1978, rev. 1982) (approx. 13-14’), and 2002 version (approx. 18’) (list of recorded performances): “a diary of longing”
- Humiwo Hayasaka, Piano Concerto (1948) (approx. 33’) is an elegy for victims of World War II.
- Jesús Guridi, piano works: Homenaje a Walt Disney (1956) (approx. 22’); Ocho Apuentes (approx. 18’)
- Gustav Holst, A Somerset Rhapsody, Op. 21/2, H. 87 (1907) (approx. 9-10’) (list of recorded performances)
- Philip Sainton, The Island (1939) (approx. 17’): the feeling in this tone poem is about memories stirred by a place, once visited.
- Patrick Hadley, The Trees So High, symphonic ballad for baritone, chorus & orchestra in A Minor (1931) (approx. 34’): about a young man’s life, cut short.
- Enrique Granados, Escenas románticas (Romantic Scenes) (1904) (approx. 21-26’) (list of recorded performances)
- Jonathan Dove, The Passing of the Year (2000) (approx. 20’)
- Morten Lauridsen, Les Chansons des Roses (1993) (approx. 12’)
- Brian Fennelly, A Sprig of Andromeda (1992) (approx. 15’): the work is drawn from a letter by Louisa May Alcott on the death of Henry David Thoreau.
- Stephen Albert, Flower of the Mountain (1985) (approx. 16’): lying next to her husband, a woman remembers their youth together.
- Joly Braga Santos, Concerto for Strings in D Minor, "To the Chamber Music Academy" (1951) (approx. 19-20’): remembrance of happy and sad, good and bad, agitated and calm.
- Alfred Reed, Giligia (A Song of Remembrance) (1999) (approx. 7’)
- Raga Anandi Kalyan (Nand – Anandi – Nand Kalyan) is a Hindustani classical raag for late evening. Performances are by Rais Khan, Nikhil Banerjee and Kumar Gandharva.
- Paul Paccione, Book of Hours (2019) (approx. 25’)
Jazz and other popular albums:
- Jan Garbarek, Bill Connors, John Taylor and Jack DeJohnette, “Places” (1976) (49’)
- Andy Fusco, “Remembrance” (2020) (69’)
- Franz Koglmann, “The Use of Memory” (1989) (65’)
- Danny Grissett, “Remembrance” (2017) (55’)
- Yarina, “Remembrance” (1996) (42’)
- Lukas Huisman, “Finnissy: Gershwin Arrangements, More Gershwin” (2021) (80’)
- Alex Hahn, “Childhood Melodies” (2024) (34’)
- In the Country, Solveig Slettahjell & Knut Reiersrud, “Remembrance” (2025) (48’)
- Charles Lloyd Trio, “Figure in Blue” (2025) (98’) “might be (Lloyd’s) most heartfelt expression yet – a reflection of all that has defined his life. Throughout a program of new original music, reinvigorated older works, and other choice selections, he demonstrates his love for pianist Jason Moran and guitarist Marvin Sewell, his fellow travelers in a new trio, and pays homage to the musicians and influences that have shaped him.”
- John Scofield & Dave Holland, “Memories of Home” (2025) (55’): on this album, memories are about traveling and playing together, and shared musical references, over decades. Out of that has grown their unity as a duo: “If it is possible for people to express a deep personal regard for one another through musical collaboration, that is what happens here.”
New Age albums:
- George Winston, “Remembrance: A Memorial Benefit” (2001) (31’)
- Deuter, “East of the Full Moon” (2005) (65’)
Other albums:
- Various artists, “I Am of Ireland: Yeats in Song” (2021) (69’) – W.B. Yeats set to music by Raymond Driver
- Burd Ellen, “A Tarot of the Green Wood” (2022) (47’), “explores ideas of transmission, memory and hidden meaning.” “Something about Burd Ellen’s eerie take on drone-heavy, experimental folk is uniquely suited to the crepuscular nooks of the year, the times of seasonal change when the cast of a landscape changes almost imperceptibly or the quality of light shifts ever so slightly.” It gives the feeling of hazy memories of a long-distant past.
- Daoirí Farrell, “The Wedding Above in Glencree” (2023) (42’): “. . . the first (song) is the epic retelling of Father Murphy that digs deep into history and the rebellion of 1798 while One Starry Night is accompanied by a stark shruti/harmonium drone. The impact of Dublin’s An Góilin Traditional Singers club (with a mention in dispatches to the Munich Folk Club ) is evident again and reinforces the importance of these clubs in keeping traditional music alive and reinvigorated.”
- Tõnu Kaljuste, Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir & Tallinn Chamber Orchestra, “Reminiscentiae” (2023) (77’) (music of Veljo Tormis): “The elemental power of ancient folk music is the lifeforce that drives the compositions of Veljo Tormis (1930-2017).”
- Kady Diarra, “Burkina Hakili” (2021) (55’) “is a celebration of the music of Burkina Faso and its melting pot of cultures and languages” . . . and “a cornucopia of pleasures and wisdom, reflecting her life, her homeland (Burkina Faso), her region (West Africa) and her griot heritage”
- Ellie Wilson, “Memory Islands” (2023) (29’): “The music on the album - written for violin, hardanger fiddle and electronics - explores the strange landscape of memory and the spirit of place. The sound world a mixture of experimental soundscapes, drones, and contemporary classical but punctuated with melodic/folky lines on the violin.”
- Chick Corea & Béla Fleck, “Remembrance” (2024) (63’)
- Ryuichi Sakamoto, “Opus” (2024) (97’): “The final concert of the Japanese virtuoso is captured in an aching meditation on mortality and legacy.”
- Jack McNeill, “Chamber Cairn” (2025) (24’): “The title feeds from the ‘idea that cairns mark out space and time, people add to them, small details in a landscape but they get left along away. They speak to you having been somewhere and then moved on.’”
- Christina Sandsengen, “Tombeaux” (2025) (27’) “is a gift of love and remembrance. Each piece is dedicated to someone I have lost – my parents and grandparents, people who shaped my life in profound ways. The album is not only about grief, but also about gratitude, admiration and the beauty of keeping their memory alive through sound. It is both an intimate diary and a universal reflection on love and loss.”
- Ellie Wilson, “Memory Islands” (2023) (29’): “The music on the album - written for violin, hardanger fiddle and electronics - explores the strange landscape of memory and the spirit of place. The sound world a mixture of experimental soundscapes, drones, and contemporary classical but punctuated with melodic/folky lines on the violin.”
Music: songs and other short pieces
- Seals and Crofts, “We May Never Pass This Way Again” (lyrics)
- Mary Hopkin, “Those Were the Days, My Friend” (lyrics)
- Dan Fogelberg, “Same Old Lang Syne” (lyrics)
- Chad and Jeremy, “A Summer Song” (lyrics)
- Brothers 4, “Greenfields” (lyrics)
- Franz Schubert (composer), Andenken (Remembrance), D. 99 (1814) (lyrics)
- Franz Schubert (composer), Erinnerungen (Memories), D. 98 (1814) (lyrics)
- Franz Joseph Haydn (composer), “Recollection” (lyrics)
- Charles-Valentin Alkan, 48 Motifs (Equisses), “Ressouvenir”
Visual Arts
- Salvador Dali, The Hallucinogenic Toreador (1970)
- Norman Rockwell, Attic Memories (1925)
- Victor Borusov-Musatov, Requiem (1905)
- Wassily Kandinsky, Old Town II (1902)
- Gustav Klimt, Beech Grove I (1902)
- Vasily Perov, Old Parents Visiting the Grave of Their Son (1874)
- Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, The Clearing: Memory of Ville d’Avray (1872)
- Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Gate of Memory (1864)
- Norman Rockwell, Fondly Do We Remember
Film and Stage
- The Dead: only at the end of the film do we learn the story behind one of the characters, whose life is colored by one haunting memory
- The Trip to Bountiful, an elderly woman’s final farewell to youth, dreams and perhaps life
- Au Revoir, les Enfants (Goodbye, Children), film-maker Louis Malle’s memoir of a childhood under Germany’s Third Reich and his unintentional betrayal of a friend – “an epitaph to innocence”
- La Plages de Agnès (The Beaches of Agnès), one woman’s retrospective look at her life