Musings      
The Death of Imagination

I know it will never happen again. I am past it. It isn't as if I have not tried. It is just that there are some things that just never come back, no matter how much you try. Maybe it is all for the best. Who knows what would have happened if I could still feel it all. I don't know what killed it. Age? Wisdom? Different place? Or has something simply extinguished within me that I can rekindle it no more.

Age...

The teen years are indeed the magical years. I know optimists might not agree, but I still hold my stand. Call it the active hormones or blame it on the excessive movies, there is something about those years that even the simplest things look so rosy. Such a contrast to all the stark reality I see now. So much reality has made me yearn for a bit of the magic of my teen years. Thanks to reality, now I wonder as I listen to very same music that used to once spin the most fantastic webs of imagination and yet feel almost nothing. This mind no longer produces those psychedelic images. It has become numb, in fact "mindless."

Wisdom

Whoever said wisdom was always good, probably never felt the sense of loss that I am feeling today for losing those wonder years of my life. Drizzles are no longer romantic and a walk in the rain is definitely out. Living in America hasn't helped either. Alone in sickness and health was never known to foster magical, nonsensical feelings - the very trademark of the wonder years.

Different place

Place definitely matters, and why should it not? After all, memories are not nameless, faceless or for that matter placeless things. And where I live now is nowhere near the place where my magic years were spent. No narrow, crooked alleys, only wide perpendicular roads. No unplanned houses, only meticulously planned array of identical communities. Each road just like the other, not totally nameless but yes, definitely identity-less in every other way. Back home it was the other way round; those little lanes might be nameless but definitely had a character and an identity of its own. There is no place I can identify with, no place with the capability to evoke those little bursts of delight and ecstasy - only sterile looks everywhere. Just another American city.

Is it dead?

It isn't as if my present life does not present me with any opportunities similar to the ones in the past. Maybe instead of blaming all things around me. I should simply blame myself. After all, the rain hasn't changed; the music is still as sweet. Maybe it is just that I no longer have the ear to listen or the imagination to feel. And the demise of one's imagination is a very painful thing to live with. But I have been infidel; I have given up on my imagination to live with reality. A sad truth - and definitely not a figment of my imagination.      

– Lopamudra Biswas
January 19, 2003

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