fluid memories

This intensification of inner life helped the prisoner find a refuge from the emptiness, desolation and spiritual poverty of his existence, by letting him escape into the past. When given free rein, his imagination played with past events, often not important ones, but minor happenings and trifling things. His nostalgic memory glorified them and th

The snapshot is meant to preserve not just an image but the moment of its taking; its intention is not documentary so much as memorial, and when we look at it we are remembering more than we are actually seeing.

By the way, I’m also finding that there’s a Doppler effect in personal memory. The normal Doppler effect, the one we all learn about in high school, happens when an ambulance comes toward you on the street. Because the distance the sound needs to travel is shrinking as it approaches you, the frequency of the sound waves is compressed, so it sounds

What’s funny about that Soul Train memory—or tragic, depending on your sense of humor—is that small memories like that can permanently distort your perspective.

GOD’S UNAVOIDABLE PRESENCE What can you ever really know of other people’s souls—of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles? One soul in the whole creation you do know: and it is the only one whose fate is placed in your hands. If there is a God, you are, in a sense alone with Him. You cannot put Him off with speculations about your

It was all I could do to get through each moment, and each moment felt like an endless hour, yet days slipped silently past. Time unused and only endured still vanishes, as if time itself is starving, and each day is swallowed whole, leaving no crumbs, no memory, no trace at all.

Once again I was struck by one of the miracles of the cognitive process—that the act of writing will summon from the buried past exactly what we need exactly when we need it. Memory and intuition and chance associations will always generate a certain percentage of what any writer writes. The remainder is generated by reason.

Memory itself could be called its own bit of creative nonfiction. We continually—often unconsciously—renovate our memories, shaping them into stories that bring coherence to chaos.

What are the smells you remember that even in memory make you stop a moment and breathe deeply, or that make your heart beat more vigorously, your palms ache for what’s been lost? Write these down. Write as quickly as you can, seeing how one smell leads to another. What kinds of images, memories, or stories might arise from this sensory trigger?