The mystery of memory is the mystery of ourselves
I have been reading Justine, the first volume of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, which I had not looked at since college. It has been a happy reunion, conjuring much of the same magic as before, its cadences echoing in the mind like favorite tunes, causing one to feel as one had not for so very long.
Durrell, I gather, has fallen into neglect since his death in 1990. In 1998, in a New York Times review of Ian S. MacNiven’s biography of Durrell, Miranda Seymour had this to say of Durrell’s masterwork:
Time was the grand theme of the Alexandrian novels, but time has not been kind in return. … [N]ow, the Quartet seems antiquated and over-written, a literary curiosity, the British Empire’s last gasp.
To Seymour perhaps. Not to Anatole Broyard, who gave it a second look in1982 and wrote, “It struck me as even better this time … one of the great city novels.”
In any event, it is not time itself that is Durrell’s theme, but time as it lives in the continuously changing ocean of our memory and the uses to which that memory is put. L.G. Darley, Durrell’s narrator, says that “what I most need to do is to record experiences, not in the order in which they took place — for that is history — but in the order in which they first became significant for me.”
This caught my attention because it echoed an experience I had last summer when I wrote, for no particular reason, an essay about certain key memories of mine, memories that were not only peculiarly vivid, but also never far beneath the surface of my consciousness, and that had exerted an immense influence on my personality and character.
Vivid and familiar though they were, they proved remarkably elusive when I tried to write about them. Detached from the feelings they aroused, they seemed commonplace enough. And the more I focused my attention upon them, the more certain details seemed to slip away. It was like trying to clutch at water.
I thought to call my older brother and go over some things with him. But he might well remember them differently, and then I would have to choose between his version of events and mine. I decided instead that memory is something we create and must be taken as it occurs to us and not subjected to cross-examination. It is a poem, not a chronicle.
As St. Augustine observes, memory is both mysterious and powerful:
The wide plains of my memory and its innumerable caverns and hollows are full beyond compute of countless things of all kinds. … I can glide from one to the other. I can probe deep into them and never find the end of them. This is the power of memory! This is the great force of life in living man ….
Principal among its mysteries is its power to shape and color the present. If I am out walking at a certain time on practically any Sunday afternoon, and the streets are largely deserted, something will be triggered in my memory that changes, as it were, the complexion of the scene before me, so that I feel as I once did at another time in another place. It is a feeling of longing and aloneness, not entirely or even predominantly unpleasant, a certain prideful alienation tinged with melancholy. Were it — or I — on a grander scale, one would call it Byronic.
A shade of blue flower, a familiar fragrance in the night — such things can transport us in an instant away from where we happen to be, and make the here and now seem not merely evanescent but downright unreal compared to the emotionally charged remembrance that has taken possession of us.
That the present can be so swiftly and completely eclipsed by an event that took place long before in a space we no longer occupy makes plain that time is not a succession of discrete moments but a continuum along which past, present and future are always in touch, a continuum that does indeed turn back on itself. The immediate past may give direction to the present, but it is the whole past that gives it its thrust and momentum.
It is obviously true that the past shapes the present — which is another way of saying that the present shapes the future. For the past was once present. But it is just as true, if less obvious, that present and future shape the past as well, by causing us to view the past from an ever-changing perspective, by means of which we can discern implications and ambiguities that went unnoticed when that past was happening. The mystery of memory is the mystery of ourselves. As Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.”
Latest posts by Frank Wilson (Posts)
- An illusion of precision - September 9, 2015
- Watching the passing scene - October 28, 2013
- To see like a child - June 26, 2013
- Riffing and digressions - January 21, 2013
- Life is a parenthesis between one darkness and another - September 13, 2012
Print This Post
Beautifully written! Now, I suppose I should find a copy of Durrell’s Alexandra Quartet and also begin again. Before doing so, though, I would offer two simple observations about memory: (1) The longer we live, we find we have too many memories (both good and bad), and our clear discernment of the past is complicated by plentitude and time; this is, I suppose, both a blessing and a curse; (2) Literature has always been involved in the preservation of memory (like a creature trapped forever in a small block of amber) in that we can perceive it in an altered state but can never really revive it, and that also is a blessing and a curse.
Thanks, Frank. As you know, I read and reread both Durrells on a sort of endless loop. Now the puzzle I’m beginning t consider is how much of our lifestory is memory and how much we unconsciously create or seek out situations that cause the re-enactment of memory. From the writers’ point of view, is memory a reference or a seemingly new script? If the memory is “re-solved,” is that the end or the beginning of a new life?
Prairie Mary
Your reference to Durrell caught my eye. I very much enjoyed your piece. You are right and Anatole Broyard is right; Miranda Seymour blows with the passing trend. You might be interested in my Alexandria: City of Memory, published by Yale University Press, 2004, which is about Durrell in Alexandria, also Cavafy and E M Forster. You can see it on my website http://www.michaelhaag.com
i find i remember what is relevant – it’s as if the rest just drops away as being filler.
A good illustration of how the past can be as vivid as the present, or more, is in the film of The English Patient – the flashback scenes are shot in vivid colour, but the present-day scenes are paler, so it seems the past is real and the present just imagined.
Looking forward to reading these now!