I paused to take one final stock of the room. When I looked out of the window, I could see the mezzanine balcony. I doubt he had stood there, looking at it as I did. From his vantage point on the bed, he’d have seen the far wall. Photos, an album of life. I sat for a while on the bed, looking at a suitcase that wrapped up the last remnants of a life.
But one day, years after the convergence has begun, you cannot only sense the inward trajectory of the walls, you can begin to see the terminal point in the offing even as the terrain that remains before you begins to shrink at an accelerating pace.
…the three infirmities amount to the same sentence: the narrowing of life at the far tip of the diamond. Step by step, the stomping grounds of these friends had shrunk from the world itself, to their country, to their county, to their home, and finally to a single room where, blinded, breathless, forgetful, they are destined to end their days. Though Abacus had no infirmities to speak of yet, his world too was shrinking. He too had watched as the outer limits of his life had narrowed from the world at large, to the island of Manhattan, to that book-lined office in which he awaited with a philosophical resignation the closing of the finger and thumb.
The Lincoln Highway, Amor Towles
In the second half of my life, I am now able to visualise this a lot more easily. There is something bittersweet about this. Like when I give away clothes. I am sometimes forced to pause for a minute because a particular tee would trigger memories of a different time. A different me. And by giving it away it is almost as though that part of me is now beyond retrieval.
Later, when I got home, I looked around. The contents of our life, now. I’m sure all of it is subject to change. Home is after all a construct of the past, present, and future.. Things that point us to the past and helps us remember it as we grow older. Things that point us to the future, and help us visualise it the way we are imagining it now. And things that point us today to our self image. The things we possess, and the things that possess us. What would happen when they all start shrinking? As we clutch what we can remember of the past, struggle to imagine what can change in the future, and watch our self image shrinking? I suspect that is how the physical space too starts shrinking. Or maybe it works both ways.
As I think about that suitcase now, and the remains of a lifetime, I wonder if he would have liked them to be in ‘the foreign object‘, a part of his happier days, which I had appropriated a decade later. I have no idea what will happen to the latter when I am gone. A cross-section of a life that no one needs to remember. And it makes me wonder as I look around again, all of these possessions which seemingly give our life meaning now, only have that meaning when we are around.
