Memoir of a Modernist's Daughter"There is always a beginning, not known as such at the time but marked off by the imagination from what memory holds in store. So I'll say that, in the beginning, there was sunlight on a meadow...Each year after we'd settled in, we would make a ritual hike to the High Rocks where, according to my grandfather, Rip van Winkle played bowling balls with the little men of the sky, then fell asleep for half a hundred years...We walked out along the back path that skirted the barn and led between raspberry bushes till we were out of sight of the house, and there we stripped naked according to the principles of Havelock Ellis... "...Once I was in the old house and faced with leaving it forever, the conflicted middle years fell away and memories of what we had been came back to me. There was a form that bound us. That form was of my father's projecting, he who so lived for the idea of family. Now the house was failing, but the form, I felt, would endure." |
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