As the year winds down and my ultimate departure from Madison looms nearer and nearer, I feel almost the way I imagine I will feel right before my death.
People always talk about how people will see their life flash quickly through their minds before they close their eyes and pass right before dying. Yet I've always thought that if I knew I was dying, I would be struck instead with a profound feeling of missing the world and all the people in my life very much.
Sometimes, as I walk towards Tenney Park to sit on its swings for what might be the last time, I get a dizzying sensation of nostalgia when I look out at the lake. What if I never get to lie down on that patch of grass by the playground ever again?
What I've realized is that the cathartic act of leaving a place or a person, and the painful reminiscing that follows, feels the same as finishing a really great book. A natural sadness as we near the end. And after it's over, we stroke our fingers across the back cover and wonder if we'll ever experience that movement and beauty again.
When I was growing up, I used to force myself to read only 20 pages of a book a night if I knew it was going to be a favorite. I would savor it, since I knew that when I was done with it, I'd feel the same emptiness in my chest that I feel when I say goodbye to a friend for a long time.
The analogy is only heightened by the fact that so many of my memories, particularly in Madison, are related to books. Not all of them are good: My freshman year, while going through a lonely rough patch, I would sit in the common room in Ogg Hall with a pile of novels to distract myself and read them literally cover to cover, afraid that if I looked away from the page I would have to force myself to make a real friend.
Memorial Library is a centerpiece in my Madison nostalgia. It's always the first place I go to when I return from an extended leave, and its eight million volume collection always has what I want. I can't think of any other place in the country where as many people will line up for a used-book sale, queuing up to fill brown paper bags with as many historical autobiographies and children's novels as they can get their hands on.
I'll miss the piles of Italo Calvino books that pile up in my room as I perpetually renew my library account, waiting for that free, warm day when I can read outside in the sunlight.
Of course, what I'll end up missing most about Madison are the friends I've made. Also, as I've discovered only recently, I'll miss the friends I haven't made, but wish I had.
That's one thing that makes books so great: they can't run away while they're sitting on a shelf, and the ones you return to the library can be recovered again in a library in another city. Even the ones you haven't read are just as reliable in the same way.
There's a reason life is often compared to a chapter book. As I write my last column ever for The Daily Cardinal, I try to push away that uncomfortable blankness that always accompanies the end of something. The end of a chapter, the end of a book, the end of college. And I try, in my head, to come up with a list of books I can read in the summer to push the melancholy away.
Have any book suggestions to distract Frances from her melancholy mood? E-mail her at provine@wisc.edu.
