Rereading History

Whenever I'm home I try to take advantage of being girded with such odd bits and pieces of my and my family's history - books I hungrily tore through when younger, much younger, books my mother or grandmother had feasted on growing up and handed down, pictures belonging to my father or someone else, his Vietnam days, his hippy days, my brother and I, my grandmother and her second husband, immigrant relatives, letters and journals from everyone, pictures and drawings, stories written, the list goes on endlessly. If there's one truth to life it's that at any given age we have enough history, a bubbling never-ending supply, to drown in if ever we should choose to. 

Amid flipping through travel photologs of my grandmother's fearless odysseys around the world and finding books that occupied my thoughts and anxieties as a wee lad in elementary school - complete with the weird scholastic version's hardback texture yet paperback size - and getting a kick out of the sentences I'd underlined or notes I'd written in the margin or the interstices between words, sometimes interesting, often revealing, sometimes vulgar, I found a copy of Fahrenheit 451. I forget which grade I was in or how old I was when I first opened and sped through this awesome book-affirming book, but I love, determinedly love, even to this day, the line I'd highlighted and circled more than once in typical shaky, sloppy scrawl. 

"I'm seventeen and I'm crazy. My uncle says the two always go together. When people ask your age, he said, always say seventeen and insane."

Such sage advice, no? Finding something from so far back and attempting to recall or, more likely, imagine what exactly that line meant to me at that time, what kind of weighty significance it held, enough to induce me to underline it as if I'd struck gold with my eyes, is a fascinating act of remembrance. I can only delight in wondering at how vindicating reading that sentence must have been to any maladjusted teenager who reads it, nods their head, and whispers "yes" so no on else can hear. The past is ultimately a mystery to us, and try as we might to understand or make sense of it, we never can; the forward progress of our daily lives is wrapped, wound, and tied into an ugly knot around this constant slightly pathetic even if endearing triangulating act of reaching backwards in an attempt to conclude with even an imprint of finality on our histories, perhaps so that we can better understand the present and maybe even predict or control the future.