June 10
Endure, and keep yourselves for better days. Perhaps one day it will please us to remember even this.
Aeneid (freely rendered)
Listening mode
Endure, and keep yourselves for better days. Perhaps one day it will please us to remember even this.
When someone tells you during a hard week that you'll laugh about it later, it rarely helps. The sentence leaps over exactly the stretch of time that still lies ahead of you. It consoles with a retrospect that doesn't yet exist.
And yet you do look back on some difficult periods with a curious fondness. You weren't glad at the time. But life back then was narrow, and for that very reason easy to take in. There was only the next step, and whoever helped you with it stood out, because there was little room for anything else.
This memory isn't entirely honest, though. It keeps the warmth and loses the duration. The many evenings when nothing got better shrink into a single sentence that makes for a good story.
Perhaps that is even merciful. But it also means that looking back doesn't know the time itself. Only someone stuck in the middle of it knows how long the enduring felt. And that length is something they will hardly find again later.
