memory

Memories are like hibernating bears. They disappear into some dark cave until you forget they were ever there, and that’s when they wake up and roar.

What did your clothes smell like? It wasn’t your own scent, Arthur thought, not to you anyway. His clothes at Hal’s always smelt of the Somerset earth, damp and iron-rich. In London, he remembered cedar and laundry detergent. And the particular scent of Eliza. The trace of chemicals from the lab where she worked, and the perfume she wore, a verbena

Had she changed as much as her hair? Probably. She wondered if she could even be considered the same person now that every cell in her body had been replaced, more than once. It didn’t seem to matter so much when the effect was growth and health but now that shrinkage and damage were the order of events, it mattered a lot. Was it possible that her

“I was thinking of that trip we took to Lake Tear of the Clouds. Remember?” “Of course. It took us two hours to get the tent up in a rainstorm.” “I thought it was clear.” She shakes her head. “No, we shivered in the tent all night and none of us slept.” “You sure about that?” “Yes. That trip was the foundation of my never-again wilderness policy.”

Such is the moral vulnerability of China’s Communist leaders that this simple act of memory is deemed a threat to stability. The power of the mothers’ bereavement is perceived as such a threat that their mourning needs to be corralled and monitored to protect the rest of the population from their grief. None of this has been lost on Zhang Xianling,

Writing from his hiding place in the basement of a U.S. embassy building in Beijing, astrophysicist Fang Lizhi, one of China’s preeminent dissidents, baldly stated that the multiplicity of Tiananmen literature heralded “the failure of the ‘Technique of Forgetting History,’ which has been an important device of rule by the Chinese Communists.” Facts

The night is so thick she can tell she is there only by the scraping of her feet and the tap, tapping of the stick in the loose gravel. A moonless night with only the call of the katydids and marsh frogs. A night to swallow you up, the stars hid by clouds, and memory guiding her tired feet home.

People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments. Which is why, even when we’ve experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives: the criteria used for selecting moments were different fo