Talking Tuesday: Laurus and the mosaic of life

Nizhni Novgorod, November 1998

The last week or so I've been putting photos into albums during spare moments.  When Boo was born, I bought my first digital camera, and started making photo books at the end of each calendar year, but up to that point, almost everything photographic in our lives was in print form.  The three-ring albums I had were clunky and took up a lot of shelf space.  We were trying to make more room for children's books, so something had to go.  I removed most of the prints from the albums and stored them in photo boxes instead (there were a few albums that I stored in a box in the basement because they were so large or were specific to a trip).

Moscow, March 2003

It was fine until recently when I moved all our photo books to a place that was more accessible to the children, and Piglet was slightly upset that there were no photos of him prior to Boo's birth.  I told him that I had boxes of photos of him, but because they were put away, he couldn't look at them.  (I had a similar issue myself when I was younger, as almost all the photos of my first year or two of life are in slide format).  I decided then that I needed to put at least some of the photos back into albums.

At my sister's wedding, October 2003

 I decided to start with the photos from the summer of 2003, when I met my husband, and go forward from there.  Four albums later, I'm up to date with our pictures.  It was an interesting memory journey to go on, to look back to that summer when I returned Stateside after living Russia, meeting my husband, deciding to go by my patron saint's name instead of my birth name, the early years of our relationship and marriage, and so on.  Who was I when I was just Jill?  It almost felt like looking at photos of someone else.  Almost.  The older I get, the more the various parts of my life feel distinct not only from one another but from myself as now.

With Piglet, July 2009

I thought this passage from Laurus perfectly captures it:

"I no longer sense unity in my life, said Laurus.  I was Arseny, Ustin, Amvrosy, and I have just now become Laurus.  My life was lived by four people who do not resemble one another and they have various bodies and various names.  What do I have in common with the light-haired little boy from Rukina Quarter?  A memory?  But the longer I live, the more my reminiscences seem like an invention.  I am ceasing to believe them and they thus lack the power to link me to those people who were me at various times.  Life resembles a mosaic that scatters into pieces.

Being a mosaic does not necessarily mean scattering into pieces, answered Elder Innokenty.  It is only up close that each separate little stone seems not to be connected to the others.  There is something more important in each of them, O Laurus: striving for the one who looks from afar.  For the one who is capable of seizing all the small stones at once.  It is he who gathers them with his gaze.  That, O Laurus, is how it is in your life too.  You have dissolved yourself in God.  You disrupted the unity of your life, renouncing your name and your very identity.  But in the mosaic of your life there is also something that joins all those separate parts: it is an aspiration for Him.  They will gather together again in Him."

~Eugene Vodolazkin, Laurus. London: Oneworld Publications, 2015, 330.