Icehenge
““I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw Or heard or felt came not but from myself; And there I found myself more truly and more strange.”
—Wallace Stevens, “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon”
Memory is the weak link. This year I will be three hundred and ten years old, but most of my life is lost to me, buried in the years. I might as well be a creature of incarnations, moving from life to life, ignorant of my own past. Oh, I “know” that once I climbed Olympus Mons, that once I visited th...e Earth, and so on; I can check the record like anyone else; but to recall none of the detail, to feel nothing for this knowledge, is not to have done it.
It isn’t as simple as that, I admit. Certain events, moments scattered here and there in my life, exist in my memory like artifacts in the layers of an excavation: fragments of meaning in the debris of time, left in a pattern of deposition that I fail to understand. On occasion I will stumble on one of these artifacts—a trolley bell in the street, and I see an Alexandrian’s smile—a whiff of ammonia, and suddenly I am reacquainted with my first daughter’s birth—but the process of deposition, the process of recovery, both are mysteries to me.MoreLess
—Wallace Stevens, “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon”
Memory is the weak link. This year I will be three hundred and ten years old, but most of my life is lost to me, buried in the years. I might as well be a creature of incarnations, moving from life to life, ignorant of my own past. Oh, I “know” that once I climbed Olympus Mons, that once I visited th...e Earth, and so on; I can check the record like anyone else; but to recall none of the detail, to feel nothing for this knowledge, is not to have done it.
It isn’t as simple as that, I admit. Certain events, moments scattered here and there in my life, exist in my memory like artifacts in the layers of an excavation: fragments of meaning in the debris of time, left in a pattern of deposition that I fail to understand. On occasion I will stumble on one of these artifacts—a trolley bell in the street, and I see an Alexandrian’s smile—a whiff of ammonia, and suddenly I am reacquainted with my first daughter’s birth—but the process of deposition, the process of recovery, both are mysteries to me.MoreLess
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