Carlsbad, California
Summer 2015
In the beginning of Camus' "Return to Tipasa" he writes, "To be sure, it is sheer madness, almost always punished, to return to the sites of one's youth and try to relive at forty what one loved or keenly enjoyed at twenty. But I was forewarned of that madness. Once already I had returned to Tipasa...I hoped, I think, to recapture there a freedom I could not forget. In that spot, indeed, more than twenty years ago, I had spent whole mornings wandering among the ruins, breathing in the wormwood, warming myself against the stones, discovering little roses...Sometimes at night I would sleep open-eyed under a sky dripping with stars. I was alive then."
It's funny, to me, that Camus paints the moments & feelings of his youth as so elusive-- using madness to underscore the impossibility of recapturing the freedom of adolescence. It's funny, to me, because returning to my hometown has always been a visceral walk down memory lane. Instead of actively chasing an intangible nostalgia, it's like I can't escape it.
I, too, have my night under a sky dripping with stars: standing next to you, alive, on the cliffs, staring at an empty ocean and talking about emotions we knew nothing about but thought we knew everything about. It all felt so intense back then.
For awhile, my old haunts plagued me. Driving through Carlsbad, I relived everything in second person. The town was littered in ghosts and I couldn't understand the silence. Maybe that's what Camus meant by madness.
As time passed, however, I started viewing the moments-I-couldn't-forget with more fondness than sadness.
These are the moments that shaped me and, therefore, make up an integral part of who I am. Each moment holds so much significance and knowledge and understanding. Especially in retrospect. And although I've grown and I've matured and I've changed (and learned that I was wrong about a lot of things), I will always be the person I was here. My innocent youth secured forever in the eternal sunshine of the past. And that's kind of beautiful, no?
"Here I recaptured the former beauty, a young sky, and I measured my luck, realizing at last that in the worst years of our madness the memory of that sky had never left me. This was what in the end had kept me from despairing. I had always known that the ruins of Tipasa were younger than our new constructions or our bomb damage. There the world began over again every day in an ever new light. O light! This is the cry of all the characters of ancient drama brought face to face with their fate. This last resort was ours, too, and I knew it now. In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer."
xx
