Memory: Finding our Way Through Time
Raymond M. Vince
What is Memory?
Of all human gifts—one which may sometimes be a curse—perhaps none can match that of memory. As I have got older, without doubt, my memories have become a more significant part of my life. My experience, of course, is far from unique. Memory is an amazing gift indeed, and a crucial part of our human identity.
More accurately, the gift of memory is part of a continual process of self-creation. In a real sense, we are our memories. For that reason, the loss of memory in various forms of dementia is tragic beyond words, for identity and uniqueness seem lost.
Memory helps us find our way through time—forwards and backward. Memory may free us from the shadow of the past, “removing its power to hurt us” (Buechner), and enabling us to face the future with confidence. We share much of our biology with others, but our memories may be the most individual aspects of our identity.
While memory can and does protect us, at times it may oppress us, stunting our growth. Memory can disturb our universe, removing our peace. But, if we understand it and use it rightly, memory may give us security. Memory—the narratives that we create—becomes the plot to our lives, explaining, justifying, comforting, and reassuring us. Memory is indispensable, enabling us to create our identities and our world. Among others, there are four books that have illuminated my fascination with memory. Here they are, with some annotations.
Some Books on Memory
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Buechner, Frederick. Telling Secrets. San Francisco: Harper, 1991. Print.
Buechner is both a novelist and a Presbyterian pastor — an unusual combination. This short paperback is part of his autobiography—three volumes so far. He writes, “We cannot undo our old mistakes or their consequences any more that we can erase old wounds that we have both suffered and inflicted, but through the power that memory gives us of thinking, feeling, imagining our way back through time we can at long last finally finish with the past in the sense of removing its power to hurt us and other people and to stunt our growth as human beings” (33). The writing of Buechner means more to me than any other contemporary Christian writer, and have for nearly twenty years. I value his honesty, his realism, and his wisdom.
Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. The Restored Edition. Edited by Sean Hemingway. New York: Scribner, 2009. Print.
Hemingway died by suicide in 1961. His four posthumous works (two of which have been re-edited and republished) remain strange and controversial. Rose Marie Burwell—in Hemingway: The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels. Cambridge: CUP, 1996. Print—suggests that in these works—A Moveable Feast (1964), Islands in the Stream (1970), The Garden of Eden (1986), and True at First Light (1999)—memory itself was becoming more significant.After World War II, he continued to work on these books, but could neither bring closure to them nor abandon them. The memory that had protected him in the past was now letting him down. As depression and illness assaulted him, he found that, in Burwell’s words, “he has descended into the iceberg… The view from inside was Lear-like. Memory and mortality ambushed him there; and filled with remorse, he tried to withdraw his book about the life of a young writer in Paris during the 1920s” (5). This, in the restored edition, is a book to return to—not only for seeing the humanity of a great novelist but for understanding our own games, illusions, and re-creations that we call memory.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Speak, Memory. Intro. Brian Boyd. New York: Everyman, 1999. Print.
This is an autobiography, but with a difference. It covers only the European part of Vladimir Nabokov’s life, from 1899 to 1940. Certainly, it has moved me more than anything I have read in years. Jonathan Yardley wrote this: “Opening it entirely at random — to any page, any paragraph, any sentence — I feel at once in the presence of the miraculous, awakened once again to the power, the magic and the mystery of the word (“Nabokov’s Brightly Colored Wings of Memory.” Washington Post 26 May 2004). Of course, all autobiography is a selective re-creation of memory, but there are some amazing experiences to be discovered here—not easily but they may be found. A profound and poignant work, and one of the greatest autobiographies of all time.
Sacks, Oliver. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and other clinical tales. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006. Print.
I found the writings of Oliver Sacks about a decade ago, and this book in particular was a revelation. A Londoner by birth and education, Sacks is a famous clinical neurologist: he was featured in the film Awakenings (Dir. Penny Marshall, 1990), played by Robin Williams. The book title sounds humorous, but Sacks tells the stories of “individuals afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations: patients who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; patients no longer able to recognize people and common objects…. If inconceivably strange, these brilliant tales remain, in Dr. Sack’s splendid and sympathetic telling, deeply human. They are studies of life struggling against incredible adversity…” (front cover). This is a book through which we may wonder at the amazing complexity of memory and of the human brain. More importantly, hearing what others have to face in life, these stories can increase our empathy.
Four Quotations on Memory
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“It is through memory that we are able to reclaim much of our lives that we have long since written off by finding that in everything that has happened to us over the years God was offering us possibilities of new life and healing which, though we may have missed them at the time, we can still choose and be brought to life by and healed by all these years later” (Buechner 32–33)
“There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were nor how it was changed nor with what difficulties nor what ease it could be reached. It was always worth it and we received a return for whatever we brought to it” (Hemingway 236)
“I witness with pleasure the supreme achievement of memory, which is the masterly use it makes of innate harmonies when gathering to its fold the suspended and wandering tonalities of the past” (Nabokov 131–132)
We have, each of us, a life story, an inner narrative—whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives. It might be said that each of us constructs and lives, a ‘narrative,’ and that this narrative is us, our identities…. Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us, through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourses, our spoken narrations. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives—we are each of us unique…. We must ‘recollect’ ourselves, recollect the inner drama, the narrative, of ourselves. A man needs such a narrative, a continuous inner narrative, to maintain his identity, his self” (Sacks 110–111).
