But the nostalgia isn't always nostalgia for a past. There are things
that produce nostalgia in advance - spaces that we know to be lost as
soon as we find them - places in which we know ourselves to be happier
than we will ever be afterwards. In such situations, the soul twists
itself around, as if in a voluntary simulacrum of seeing its present in
retrospect. Like an eye watching itself look from the perspective of a
later time, it sees that remote present and yearns for it.
Sara is doing an oil painting from a snapshot she took in Madrid some
years ago, when we lived there together. It's of a long, narrow street
called the Paseo de los Melancolicos, through which we often had to ride
home. Along the bank of the river Manzanares - that "liquid irony," as
Ortega y Gasset described it, due to its almost total lack of water -
the melancholy Paseo de los Melancolicos stretches out like a pleonasm.
On one buy anabolics steroids side is a row of gray buildings, each one identical to the last.
On the other, a concrete wall behind which one has to imagine that, a
few steps away, an attempt at a river flows. In this section of its
course, where the waters resemble black bile, the Manzanares has vents -
tall tubes sprouting skyward from the water like the chimneys of an
old, sunken factory. Nobody knows the purpose of those giant industrial
pipes, but on some winter nights they emit a sound like whale song and a
fetid vapor that settles on the Paseo de los Melancolicos like a
beautiful, suffocating blanket.
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