Ten years ago, when I traveled to England, I noticed my acne scars for the first time while in the Cotswold, sitting in a bathtub. They were like dozens of freckles—there, beneath the vanity’s light, as water dripped from the faucet onto my feet. I followed their outlines with my finger, contorting my body so that I could assess each one. Though most of the marks were several years old, the newer ones hurt—especially when I touched them.
That summer, I was traveling around England with my high school boyfriend and his family—his father, who grew up in the Cotswold, guided us through London and the English countryside—and for two weeks we stayed in the farmhouse where my boyfriend’s grandfather and aunt still lived. The house was surrounded by a garden and several acres of fallow land; at the end of its gravel drive was a pond, which we walked around every morning with the family’s terrier, and where a handful of white ducks—rumored escapees from a nearby farm—buoyed themselves like plumes of feathery algae. During the days we spent at the homestead, my boyfriend and I watched the BBC with his grandfather and played card games with his younger sister; in the evenings, after everyone had taken their baths, some of us would sit out in the garden with lanterns and listen as the mourning doves sounded off in the wind. But mostly, given that I was there with him, I relished in the freedom of having traveled so far away with my boyfriend—a chance at imagining a different life away from the stresses of home and the strange emptiness I felt when I thought about it. In England—in this house—I could pretend.
On the afternoon my mother had died—a few months earlier, in April—my boyfriend had driven over to the house and walked with me around my neighborhood. From the kitchen window, I watched as he parked the car beside the blossoming hydrangea before running up the porch steps. “I feel fine,” I told him, opening the door. “Really. I knew this would happen.” And it was true—that for several weeks, my family had been in and out of the hospital coming to terms with Mom’s prognosis. Not good, then bad, then nothing. In the weeks leading up to that afternoon, my father had explained to me in the kitchen one night that everyone is born a perfect sphere—a sphere that gathers dents and bruises throughout a lifetime—and that my sphere had been dented a little early.
“What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is the human brain? Such a palimpsest is my brain; such a palimpsest, oh reader! is yours. Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your brain softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before. And yet, in reality, not one has been extinguished.”—Thomas de Quincy
In 1845, English writer and essayist Thomas de Quincy, whose Confessions of an English Opium-Eater inaugurated addiction literature in the West, wrote at great length about humans’ capacity for memory and grief. “[Are memories] like the undulating motions of a flattened stone which children cause to skim the breast of a river, now diving below the water, now grazing its surface, sinking heavily into darkness, rising buoyantly into light, through a long vista of alternations?”1 But his use of the palimpsest as metaphor for memories—that the palimpsest is a “membrane or roll cleansed of its manuscript by reiterated successions”—is what inspired many in the humanities to consider these visible shadows and impressions as essential when hoping to understand the past. The “palimpsest becomes less a bearer of a fixed final inscription than a site of the process of inscription, in which acts of composition and transmission occur before our eyes.”2
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My boyfriend’s father took us to the Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, England, on one of the clearer afternoons—a Jacobean estate built by Robert Cecil in 1611. We toured the surrounding gardens before heading inside to the attached Old Palace, where Henry VIII summered in the late 1500s with his children: Mary, Elizabeth, and Edward. I had learned about the first Queen Elizabeth while my mother was in the hospital—however, Elizabeth’s forty-four year reign interested me less than her early childhood did. Her mother, Anne Boleyn—the infamous second wife to Henry VIII—was executed when Elizabeth was just two years old, and only after several years of of competitive, bloody jousts between herself and her siblings did she finally succeed to the throne. But none of this moved me as much as the simple fact that Elizabeth was once a young girl running through the halls of the Old Palace, unaware of her motherless fate or the countless ways in which it would impact her. As we later walked through the estate’s chapel—my boyfriend’s father and aunt by the pulpit, and the two of us by the stained-glass window—I started to cry. What I hadn’t allowed myself to recognize until that moment was the homesickness I felt for a home I could never return to. The house I grew up in, the bedroom my mother slept in: these places were relics of a past I could no longer access, and roaming the rooms of a family estate with scratches and stains and portraits and heirlooms felt like reenacting my grief again and again.
“Yes, reader, countless are the mysterious hand-writings of grief or joy which have inscribed themselves successively upon the palimpsest of your brain; and, like the annual leaves of aboriginal forests, or the undissolving snows on the Himalaya, or light falling upon light, the endless strata have covered up each other in forgetfulness. But by the hour of death, but by fever, but by the searchings of opium, all these can revive in strength. They are not dead, but sleeping.”—de Quincy
Back at the house, my boyfriend asked that I leave him alone. He needed time away from my moods, which had become irregular and difficult, and headed toward the pond to play guitar. The hardest part about losing my mother was feeling grown in ways I had no language for. I wanted to lean on those around me but felt unable to—my friends, all teenagers, were just as incapable of consoling as I was of asking for help. This is when I decided to shower; as his aunt was watching television from her darkened bedroom, I climbed into the tub and held my knees toward my chest. The family’s terrier nuzzled his snout into the rug beside the sink—he liked sleeping in the bathroom during showers—while I washed myself with the hand-held shower nozzle. I could hear the crunch of gravel as my boyfriend wandered back down the drive, so I hurriedly rinsed off and stood up. I needed to apologize for being so difficult, for not having the words. I knew I was hurting but didn’t know how to say it. I was still a child, but so much of my life demanded that I have the answers and the resolve, but in the end, it was walking through an empty estate that brought me to tears.
After dropping my towel to the tub, I saw the dozens of red and brown spots—my shoulders and chest covered in marks from weeks of anxiously picking at my skin. From outside the bathroom door, my boyfriend’s family started to move around the house, preparing dinner and tidying the kitchen; I wanted to dry off quickly and join them. But I couldn’t move, at least not for several minutes. Not before I understood just how much I was hurting—there, standing in the soft fluorescence of a countryside bathroom, I saw myself for the first time. Mottled skin. Pocked skin. Layers of reds and pinks and browns. Mourning doves coo-ed outside of the open window. The family dog scratched at the door, wanting to be let out. I opened it a crack, and he ran towards the voices—down the stairs and into the living room, where everyone was sitting together, eating and drinking, after the afternoon they spent touring someplace beautiful.
Thanks for reading,
Rachel
De Quincey, Thomas. “The palimpsest of the human brain.” 1845. Quotidiana.Ed. Patrick Madden. 1 Dec 2006. 20 Jun 2024 <http://essays.quotidiana.org/dequincey/palimpsest_of_the_human_brain/>.
Bernstein, George. Williams, Ralph. Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities, 1993.