A Wistful Lament for an Irrecoverable Loss

Abstract

Reminiscing over the past while surrounded by ancient Egyptian temples in Luxor, the author of this testimonial essay reflects on the significance of the past in personal and collective consciousness. Drawing on her own experience, she views all search as inevitably linked to yearning for the irrecoverable first impression, la scene primitive. Her own specialization in medieval Latin literature did not conflict with her passion for modern literature. Modern texts captivate as they echo motifs from medieval, classical, and renaissance literatures. To truly appreciate the modern, one needs to recognize the richness of the past in it. ********** I write this in Luxor, an appropriate and agreeable place to seek out pasts, whether personal or historic; for, surely, all our searches are driven by the same nostalgia, a yearning for that irrecoverable first impression, that initial imprint staking out its territory of individual history in the collective consciousness. And the scene primitive for us who live in the present is primitive precisely in that it is an individualizing experience universally shared. Each of us seeks his beginnings because in our beginnings we hope to rejoin the grounds of our being, the ends beckoning to be reborn from which we spring, as though to recover a retrievable progenitor in lieu of the aimless and purposeless creator, powerless to repeat the singularity of his act in forming the one of its kind that each of us is. For always there is that in our beginnings which was underived from an end and which is irrecoverably lost in our end. Hence the immeasureable sadness of the individual death and hence the impetus to seek in the past for the long history of individual suffering reabsorbed into the universal consciousness, to comb the lived individual lives for whatever light they might shed on the individual journey, whatever spark might be shaken from past lives "like shook foil," of understanding, or wisdom, or beauty. And here in Luxor is very close indeed to where our knowledge of individual lives and communities begins. I have been asked for a personal account of my own career with its shift of interest from the medieval to the modern and I find Luxor an appropriate place to jot down these thoughts and memories since it was to Egypt I came at the start of my teaching career where, in some ironic reversal I left the study of the past to examine the present. Upon reflection, it was perhaps more appropriate than might have appeared that in New York City, the matrix of modernity where I was born and lived, I should have sought out the past, and in Egypt, where civilization all began, I should have embraced the present and sought out the contemporary: "In our beginnings are our ends; in our ends our beginnings." It is no wonder that a New Yorker should seek her bearings in the ancient world; there is nothing surprising in that she should scurry toward the contemporary having once ascertained the presence of the past. In all my studies I had encountered artists and scholars who had built firmly on the past, the New Learning humanist, John Colet, the subject of my Honors Paper, having steeped himself in the medieval scholastic tradition looked to the more distant past to Greek and Latin Classics for "new" knowledge. Chaucer, my major poet, saluted, in all that he wrote, the wisdom and skill of all "that ban gan beforn" adding his individual talent to the great tradition. Thomas Chaundler, the subject of my PhD thesis, wrote a medieval Morality play and introduced into its dramatic form, Ciceronian Latin and classical moral virtues. The section of the thesis devoted to Sources is almost as long as the play itself and is a showcase of Intertextuality (a word not yet current when I wrote) with titles from texts and MSS in Latin, Old French, German, Old English, and Middle English. Originality had not yet become equated with ignorance of the past and Chaundler's language was larded with passages from Church Fathers, the Bible, Classical authors, etc. …