THE QUARRY
memory-essay #5
video 2025
A collector brought rare plants into the garden created out of the old quarry. Then new owners came like settlers, whose only desire was to conceal their history and be accountable to no-one, left to their own devices, their freedom more important than anything.
They built out the house and made the garden still more beautiful, so you could look from the village road over the low stone wall, and be deceived by the green and immaculate mask (with a k) hiding the soulless, neurotic family masque (with a q) replaying day after day on the other side of the wall—replaying day after day, all so they could respect nothing, remember nothing.
Before my final university exams I used to go to the famous gardens nearby with revision cards, and after a while fall asleep in the warmth of early summer, and it was so peaceful and I was happy then when all I had to do was memorise what I had learned.
Often in the evening I sat with a friend for half an hour, talking of little else than our playing cards and the cribbage board, and being in the comfort of his kindness was a different sort of lesson.
Thirty years later we were talking again, he and I, and I said to him that I would go back to those days if I could and he said “oh I would too” and I thought it was beautiful how an old man treasured what was gone. And it was the time of goodbye and he called me by the nickname he chose when I was still a teenager, and like a father he called me by my given name.
A strong wind blows through the quarry garden as it was and as you see it now from the strange high place of return where, however, words reach you from below.
First come kindly words: “Don’t linger there, it is better to move on—give up this lonely and unhappy vigil, don’t get lost in the leaves.” And then something more: “You don’t see things clearly, there is so much you’ll never understand, and you’d be wise not to let your lurid imagination rip. Your remembering twists the truth. And who are you anyway to say this beautiful garden is guilty and forgetful?”