Light, Remembering, and Benjamin

 I have been reading about memory and remembering. The other day my friend shared another excerpt from Gilead. He loved, as Amanda did, the relationship between light and memory. He shared this: 

 I was struck by the way the light felt that afternoon.  I have paid a good deal of attention to light, but no one can begin to do it justice.  There was the feeling of a weight of light--pressing the damp out of the grass and pressing the smell of sour old sap out of the boards on the porch floor and burdening even the trees a little as a late snow would do.  It was the kind of light that rests on your shoulders the way a cat lies on your lap.  So familiar.

 And this:

The moon looked wonderful in this warm evening light, just as a candle flame looks beautiful in the light of morning.  Light within light. . . .  It seemed to me to be a metaphor for the human soul, the singular light within the great general light of existence.  Or it seems like poetry within language.  Perhaps wisdom within experience.  Or marriage within friendship and love.

And then there is Walter Benjamin's essay "Image of Proust," which discusses memory and forgetting: "When we awake each morning, we hold in our hands, usually weakly and loosely, but a few fringes of the tapestry of lived life, as loomed for us by forgetting. However, with or purposeful activity and, even more, our purposive remembering each day unravels the web and ornaments of forgetting."

I am not sure what I have to say about them, but they just were so beautiful I've been thinking about them for days.