Every one of those keen moments has left its trace and lives in us still, but such traces have blent themselves irrevocably with the firmer texture of our youth and manhood; and so it comes that we can look on at the troubles of [...] children with a smiling disbelief in the reality of their pain. Is there any one who can recover the experience of his childhood, not merely with a memory of what he did and what happened to him [...] but with an intimate penetration, a revived consciousness of what he felt then [...]?
George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
Each of us, sooner or later, has to
come to terms with his own childhood. It happens when we least expect
it. Something surprisingly familiar, a sudden sound, a pungent scent,
transports us back in time and making us relive a moment abandoned in
some dusty corner of our memory. A small fragment of life that,
turned into a memory, is able to snatch a smile. Sometimes a tear.
Sometimes it happens in a distant
country. While we pursue the pleasure of discovery, when everything
should be unusual and unknown, our mind deceives us. And we seem to
see along the shore of the lake, beyond the mist that veils the
horizon, a place where, long ago, we loved to run without ever
getting tired. Where the days seemed endless and wheat ripened under
a generous sun.
Thus it happens that, thousands
kilometres north, decades later, we recognize the place we used to
call home.
Monica Zaghi
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