REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST

June 14, 2012                  

This morning we awoke to a light breeze wafting through the open window, finding its way to our faces where it teased us awake with its fresh breath. Proust, I am sure, would luxuriate in such a breeze, staying with it long enough for it to dazzle his mind with such consciousness and reminiscence as to encourage him to write of its spiritual and metaphysical properties for at least 2 pages. 

Perhaps it is the same breeze. Perhaps he inhaled it so deeply that it has taken a century for his exhalation to reach me, carrying to my senses, if not illuminating them to such a great depth as he was wont, the urge to journey to the linden tree atop Rocca D’Orcia, with the vision, which awoke with me, of sitting beneath its ancient, blossom-laden branches whilst reading In Search Of Lost Time.

Back in the 90’s, when Joel and I were teaching our workshop here, we would give our students the middle weekend off, not only so that they might digest what they had learned during the first week, but also so that Joel and I could have 2 days of replenishing solitude. The students were free to go wherever they wished and we made a point of not telling them the location of our retreat, knowing it was highly unlikely that they’d find their way to this tiny village. We would drive the 30 minutes there, after Friday lunch, climb the winding road up to the top of the village and just disappear into sleep and silence until Sunday afternoon when we would once again become Ma and Pa workshop to some 30 students of writing and photography.

Back then, Rocca D’Orcia boasted perhaps 20 houses and one 3 bedroom Inn above a small, exquisite restaurant. We would be given the enormous key to our room, the window of which looked out and over the whole Val D’orcia, and would immediately flop onto the horsehair mattress and, drugged with the scent of star jasmine, disappear into the first siesta. Perhaps we’d take a small walk before dinner and an early to bed night.

Our second siesta, on Saturday afternoon, would be taken on the bench beneath the linden tree in front of the Inn. At that time the tree measured some 20’ wide and stood twice as tall in a miniscule piazza between two cisterns. Its presence was profound. The space it inhabited being barely wider than the spread of its branches and, as our workshop took place during Linden season, would be just dripping with thousands of clusters of flowers of a shade of cream resembling old ivory, and whose perfume, unlike bottled perfumes which, after the first sniff cease to deliver their so-called bouquet, would continue arousing the sense of ones’ nostrils, the aroma, instead of lessening, becoming headier with every inhalation until, after a quarter of an hour the cortex of the brain felt to be lined with pollen.

And then there were the bees, numbering as many as the flowers. Invisible at first, it was the hum of their industry, thrumming throughout the tree that would awaken the sense of hearing to their presence, the deep drone of which was like a never-ending Ohm.

So, imagine our disappointment when, after a delicious lunch in neighboring Bagno Vignoni, we drove in great anticipation to the top of Rocca D’Orcia only to find ‘our’ tree so drastically pruned as to not only appear unremarkable, but worse yet, be without a single blossom; its energy, one supposes, being used for the sole purpose of spreading its branches back to the radius where they belong.

Yet all was not lost. Out mottos for a year now have been ‘More Fun Now’ and ‘Make The Most Of What You Have.’ And so it is that we remembered that during our post lunch passegata around the village of Bagno Vignoni we were pleasantly surprised by the scent of linden blossoms issuing forth from 5 relatively small trees standing in a circle in the little piazza; a piazza which, because it is early in the tourist season (and because of the economy tourists are far fewer than usual) and because vehicles are not allowed in the village, was practically deserted and most tranquil.

So we drove back, parked our car on the outskirts and, grabbing two chairs from outside a closed café are now sitting peacefully amidst the circle of trees.

Although I have been writing, Proust has not been forsaken: he’s in Joel’s lap on a Kindle (don’t tell Marcel!) from whence Joel is inhaling a plethora of poetic prose in the perfumed peace of a piazza.