farmdoc's blog post number 439

‘So long it’s been good to know you’, ‘Leaving on a jet plane’, ‘Leaving London’, ‘Softly as I leave you’, ‘Bye bye love’. I’m sure you can add to this inchoate list of departure songs. Self-evidently, leaving and farewelling’s a forcefully evocative and emotional topic for songwriters. It is for me too. I find departing difficult. It’s hard for me to leave an uncomfortable situation because I always blame myself for the discomfort. For example I agonise when I empty-handedly leave a shop whilst the shopkeeper watches me going. That’s irrational of me, if not downright stupid. But it’s how I feel. Departing a good situation’s equally difficult for me – because I feel the early pangs of nostalgia or something similar. It may have been something that’ll never happen to me again in what remains of my life. Or something I’ll never do, or somewhere I’ll never go, or someone I’ll never see. For example I don’t feel good that I’ll never again see a live Simon and Garfunkel concert. I feel I should accept the recent past with sanguinity and equanimity, and then turn to face the future and move forwards into it. But that’s not easy for me to do. Neither is it, I reckon, for the writers of those myriad songs of farewell. And surely that’s the reason why the French say au revoir which is equivalent to the Hebrew l’hitraot, i.e. until we see each other again. Both those words of farewell are more hopeful and less final than good-bye. Me? I’ll settle for See you later.