The Half We've Known...

"If it's half as good as the half we've known, here's Hail! to the rest of the road."

-Sheldon Vanauken

Reading A Severe Mercy has been one of the highlights of this autumn. There are books you read and think, "ah yes--I am glad I read it so that I can say I've read it. Besides--it was a good enough book in it's own right." And then there are books that draw you in and play upon your heart and are so enjoyable that you eye the receding number of pages nervously, knowing that the end draws near. I am not finished reading A Severe Mercy yet, but I've come to the part where Van is going through an Illumination of the Past and "reliving" his life with Davy after her death.

Every memory of their life together--journals, letters, music, smells, books, everything--comes alive and he is overwhelmed with the blessing of their time together.

"As I travelled through the past, month by month, year by year, so it leaped into life. I remembered not only that which was written down but a hundred things besides...without exaggeration, it was one of the two or three most amazing experiences of my life. Even though I had planned it, I had not had the faintest idea that the past could be recreated with such extraordinary brilliance and reality."

-A Severe Mercy

It set me to thinking, as good things will, about my own life. Memory, as Longfellow said, "is the bliss of solitude"...so why do we keep it for the days when all memory-making is past? When the people, the pleasures, the events of our lives are nothing but faint watercolors on parchment? When we have no abilities besides watching the merry play of our lives in retrospect. Everyone takes pleasure in reading a memoir, yet when were the memoirs written? Likely at an after-period in the person's life when they had nothing left but memories.

I started to think about the things I love so well in this life. The small pleasures that I will probably forget by and by, and yet the ones that have shaped me, perhaps, more than the greater things. I am a firm believer in the idea that everything that happens to a person--good and bad--somehow shapes their lives, unconsciously or not. And I don't want to lose track of the Beautiful in this helter-skelter world we live in. These blessings we think of as expendable...they are blessings all the same and are from the Lord for: "every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father..." We are greedy in our very nature. Because we've been blessed with so many beautifuls in our life, we tend to think, "Ah--why remember that? It's not important." But it is...so very important. And the small things are the most important of all.

So I've created a blog event for us to remedy the situation. I'll call it "The Half We've Known," (taking its name from the Vanauken's yearly toast to their marriage) and you can even take the picture off my side-bar and add it to your own.

There won't be a set time for this blog event--do it as you feel like it. But I hope to do it at least twice a month. The rules are simple:
Write about a memory you have. Something elusive and gentle. I'd even say keep it to the smaller things you're in danger of forgetting someday. Write about something you take pleasure in, or something that has happened to you. It could be small like the time I watched the moon rise above the ocean and realized how bright a moon could be...it could be larger, like the first time you realized you loved a person. But whatever it is, I want you to devote a whole post to it. Describe the moment to yourself and your readers in a way that gives us the ability to almost touch the memory. Don't be skimpy on details. The idea is to remember. Remember with everything inside you.
And when you're done, if the memory has become vivid through its writing, you might even print it off and save it somewhere and by and by you'll collect a deal of The Half We've Known and be able to sing truthfully, "here's Hail! to the rest of the road."

Who's with me on this?