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Dreams of Youth

Youth is where all lifelong dreams are born
and adult life is where they are ignored.
In middle age, when we first feel forlorn,
they both depress us and they make us bored,
but they return in old age when we’re haunted
by deeds we did not do despite our dreams,
forgetting all about them when we flaunted,
in adult life and middle age, our schemes,
and when in our old age we try recalling
what we once dreamt there is no one to share
the message of the dreams we found enthralling,
and lost when we awoke and did not dare.

Richard Bernstein reviews André Aciman’s “Out of Egypt” in The New York Times, 7/20/00. Talking about Illiers, the place about which Proust wrote calling it Combray, Aciman writes: “Illiers itself was simply a place where the young Proust dreamed of a better life to come. But, because the dream never came true, he had learned to love instead of the place where the dream was born.