When you are old and gray ...
 Thank
Reader's Digest condensed series editors who inserted these lines as an
extract-prologue to Nicholas Sparks' 'Notebook'. The novel's theme about
an ageing couple with their love held sway through thick and thin aptly
suits the verse. The husband had been keeping a notebook and read it out
loud to his wife in her deathbed. It touched me no end and I moved on to
the sequel 'Wedding', where the husband, Noah, confesses to his
son-in-law he did that to please himself. Reading out the diary leaves
brought the old man to the past - so nostalgic, isn't it?
That's Noah's story. I have my story too.
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When you are
old and gray and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep
- W. B. Yeats |
Autograph was a joke at the university, but I remember I had a
crumpled monitor exercise book as an autograph towards end of my A/Ls. I
did not fancy those fresh-scented synthetic-looking autographs. I don't
think I liked autographs very much either. But still I had the crumpled
exercise book just for the fun of it. Not only I had that, but I had a
strange teacher too - who said only those who forget past would require
an autograph. Now this word is going to be a little heavy - but honestly
he left me 'flabbergasted'.
Normally our folks don't write on their own autographs. But my
teacher made me do otherwise. His words were sinking in. And gradually I
realized they were troubling me. So I scrawled down.
My face comes out on the memory mirror. I cannot but breathe
impermanence. Do I need it? I simply don't know. I soothe myself
caressing the memory mirror, wiping out its long grown dust. Time looms
large crying out something I cannot understand. It is but fast, faster,
and who knows it maybe even faster. Feed your memories then into these
leaves by the sweet syringe of yours. I will be happy with the
leftovers. And the impermanence shall no longer stay on in my life - my
memory mirror!
That's some years ago. My friends laughed at my autograph, and wrote
down whatever they felt about me.
A few days back I was leafing through those soft yellowish pages of
my autograph. Some made me smile. Some made me almost cry. Some have
been penned down. Some have been typed. Some have been plagiarized (of
which I'm quite all right). I wonder where some of those authors are
now. Relationships, friendships they all drew closer wired in a dungeon.
But I am afraid I can call it melancholy or nostalgia, because I do not
wish if that past were the present. It's like a mosaic montage I like to
keep on watching.
Not only that. Those who I still keep in touch have changed a lot. I
realize it looking at their writings back then. It shows the evolution
of their self. Their thinking.
So that makes me see it as an autobiography too, because you get
others to write about you here. It's more an autobiography than a
biography in that sense.
It's time we stopped despising autographs, if you do, because it's
another kind of literature. It's where you can measure your friend's
creativity if s/he doesn't copy from another source.
Like Yeats, I pace upon the mountains of memory and hide my face amid
a crowd of stars.
I guess you have an autograph. Go for it and make sure you have it
hidden in a safe until you'll feel its worth when you are old and gray.
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