Strength In What Remains Behind

I'm watching 1961's Splendor in the Grass.

It seems like a stroke of serendipity that it would be on tonight because in the past few weeks I seem to keep bumping into musings along the lines of "You can't go home again", "The past always seems golden because it is the past", "Don't try to recapture/revisit/touch the past because you'll be bitterly disappointed", etc.

This film has one of the saddest endings in movie history. Although in the storyline, everyone turns out ok, the spoken subtext throughout that last sequence is permeated by the cold metallic clink of a door being locked one final time.

This is such a watery, jewel colored movie.

Wistful
Nostalgic
The sound of water flowing down a river
An old song (12, 23, 36 years ago...)
The smell of the place: the sand and the soil and the grass and the tide.
The sounds singing and whispering and yesterday

Wordsworth was really onto something.

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more....

What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind...