pre-nostalgia

Ever since I decided to leave San Francisco, everything has been tinged with pre-nostalgia. On Saturdays I go the Noe Valley Farmers Market with my sister, brother-in-law and nephew. When we started going, Baby Jamieson was but a wrinkled peapod in a soft brown sling. Now, sporting checkered Vans and an orange vest, he walks a good chunk of the way there.

How does one mark time? There is T.S. Eliot's classic line, "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons." (As I write, I am listening to the Prufrock-inspired song by the Crash Test Dummies.)

Yesterday, I taught my last class of the semester, which was also my last class at Berkeley. As you can imagine, floods of pre-nostalgia. I've been rereading Eliot for sentimental reasons, but Eliot himself was far from sentimental. His meditations on time, language, beginnings and ends are lyrical yet unflinching, "precise but not pedantic." My favorite bit of late, which I read to my class, is from Four Quartets:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now always -
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

I hope I didn't depress my bright-eyed students with all the talk of remembrance and return. They are at the wave's peak, whereas I am betwixt and between - preparing to leave the comforting rhythms of the university semester and the delights of my nephew's magical growth, but poignantly pre-nostalgic too.