Mneiae

Mneiae 

by Lawrence Durrell

Soft as puffs of smoke combining, 

Mneiae — remembrance of past lives: 

The shallow pigmentation of eternity 

Upon the pouch of time and place existing. 

I, the watcher, smoking at a table, 

And I, my selves, observed by human choice, 

A disinherited portion of the whole: 

With you the sibling of my self-desire, 

The carnal and the temporal voice, 

The singing bird upon the spire: 

And love, the grammar of that war 

Which time's the only ointment for, 

Which time's the only ointment for. 

I love the serendipity of it.  One thing leads to another and I end up in a collection of Lawrence Durrell poems.  I have always thought you need to have some good wine and good company in you to read his poetry.  There are often only gossamer connections between his words and ideas and you have to let your mind slip gently across meanings to follow his thought.

What I like in this instance is not the serendipity of stumbling across him today.

Rather it is the serendipity of its relationship to last night.  Mneiae is Greek for remembrance, memory, mention.  

Last night a party of seven of us were dining together at the home of our genial and wonderfully civilized host and hostess.  They are art collectors and their home beautifully created and adorned.

We were family and old friends all mixed together.  The conversation turned to things as aids to memory.  There was an proposition made that there are two elements of any beautiful thing.  The first is its inherent being of beauty but the second is that it then becomes a receptacle of happy memory.  

You see it again later as the aesthetic thing it is but it is now imbued with mneiae.  It calls forth a memory of your first fresh appreciation of it, the people with whom you experienced the appreciation, the place or the time or context.  Beautiful things are beautiful in themselves but they are a repository of wonderful memories to be called forth when lonely, or cold, or miserable, or under painful circumstances.  

It is a rich world and here I stumble across Durrell's Mneiae, through no design or intent echoing a happy conversation from the night before.