BY KLAUS DÖRING
“THE YEARS Between” (1946) is a British film directed by Compton Bennett and starring Michael Redgrave, Valerie Hobson and Flora Robson in an adaptation of the 1945 play “The Years Between” by Daphne du Maurier. It was shot at the Riverside Studios.
“Evocative details about family, friends, writers and landscapes make Lynn Cohen’s ‘Between the Years’ vibrant and moving. Her landscapes are filled with memories that balance between nostalgia and revelation, as we journey with the poet through the cycle of searching, finding, losing, and recovering. Loss and aging dance with youth and fulfillment, creating poems of lyrical intensity and surprise. Look for ‘Affairs are not for the Faint Hearted’, ‘Gretchen’, ‘Colossus’, and ‘City of Glass’. Lynn’s poems remind us that an epic unfolds between birth and death.”
New Year’s Day is the pause between the past and the future – after the grand retrospectives of Hanukkah and Christmas but before the resolutions and predictions kick in. This is one of the few moments in the year when we are almost forced to contemplate the strange propulsion of time that carries us along through life. You can choose your own metaphor. Do the years feel like combers rolling onto the beach, one after the other? Do you feel as if you’re swimming downstream with the current of a mighty river? Or does this winter-shift from one year to the next feel like a portage through dark woods between two lakes?
From time to time most of us aspire to episodes of timelessness, if that isn’t a contradiction in terms. Parents look at their children, or we look at our parents, and there is a horrifying thrill in how rapidly they change, a thrill that makes us want to stop time, as much for ourselves as for them. There are days so beautiful, so productive, so happy that we would like to fix them in our minds for good as the prototype of all days – while knowing that what makes those days so memorable is also the fact that they slide past as if by their own momentum. But the momentum is ours, too. It’s tempting to believe on New Year’s Day that we are standing still while the world rushes on, as if we were passengers in one of Einstein’s thought experiments. But who is to say that we aren’t the ones rushing onward, and the world is trying desperately to keep up? Time’s arrow is embedded in the very nature of this universe, and it’s a good thing, too, because otherwise everything would be so disorganized.
Many times we are really in too much of a hurry while feeling uncomfortable if we notice how time flies. Yes, my late grandmother was right, when she said: The older you become, the faster time passes by. My late mother told us the same. Yes, I am 71 now. I can only strongly agree with her.
When I was still a teenager, I was longing to be an adult already. Later, I enjoyed listening to my late grandmother (born 1898!) stories such as “Once upon a time” or “When I was young” from her life yesterday’s life.
After a couple of years, especially while observing that time really flies like a racket to the moon, I also have the same question in mind: Are the present hours and days less valuable?
Of course, each day has its own set of happiness and trials. But it also holds very high possibilities of how we take the initiative to do or to move something, if…! Yes, the luring term IF lets us look into the future with an overblown “glistening” eye: IF I will finish my studies – IF my children become adults – IF I might become rich and win in the lottery, yes IF! And then?
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