hiraeth, dream boxes and quotes

 TS Eliot quote – "...and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."

 and another:

Lee Wilson Dodd: ‘Much that I sought, I could not find.  Much that I found, I could not bind.  Much that I bound, I could not free.  That which I freed returned to me.’

 

Gloria was constantly redecorating - she painted names on tiles in two bathrooms

Anderson Cooper on his mother Gloria Vanderbilt:

On a small Syrian bone-inlay table just in front of the Shikler (portait of her), there was a stack of old letters bound with twine in a small plexiglass box. It was one of my mom's ‘Dream Boxes’, a series of assemblages she made years back. This was my favourite.  She’d found the letters at a flea market and liked to imagine what secrets they contained.  Was it the correspondence of young lovers separated by misfortune? The returned letters of a spurned suitor?  What had happened to the writer and the recipient?  She could have cut the twine and discovered whatever mysteries the letters contained, but what would be the fun in that?  So she kept them tightly bound and on display. 

...She had encountered a Welsh word – hiraeth – that had great significance for her. It has no direct translation, but one definition she liked was ‘a homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home which maybe never was; the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for the lost places of your past.’ 

I think that explains a lot about my mom and the rooms she created. She felt that hiraeth all her life.