Traveling to Myself
Last night I watched a movie I had seen before but only sort-of remembered -
Night Train to Lisbon with Jeremy Irons.
I watched it because I did not recall the story but I felt that there was something in it I wanted to "catch' again.
And - there was.
The story is a mix of mystery, romance, and discovery set in Lisbon - in a non-specific modern time. The characters too are rather universal and yet non-discript- soft identities that do not take away from the story itself. The Irons character , a middle-age professor, saved a girl from jumping off a bridge in Bern, she runs away and he impetuously hops on a train to follow her to Lisbon to find her and discover her story. You guess soon into the movie that who he eventually finds, along with an interesting story, will be himself.
The key to the search for the girl is a haunting memoir by a young doctor - the other driving character. The heart of the story rests in the book.
All of this was familiar to me as I re-visited the movie - but then in the ending - - AH, HA - I found what I was looking for - a piece of verse:
I spent some time this morning capturing it - I don't want to lose it again because the poem speaks to why I am tied to memoir and to capturing my past. Its the reason for my own personal searches - and at 80 years old I have a lot of ground to cover as I find bits of myself and quilt them together.
From the movie: Night Train to Lisbon
This is the passage one of the characters writes into his journal which will become his book.
We leave something of ourselves behind in a place we have been
We stay there even though we go away
There are things in ourselves we find again only by going back there
We travel to ourselves when we go back to a place where we have covered a stretch of our life
No matter how brief it may have been.
Ah, yes.
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