memory
Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy—that’s the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.
East of Eden (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 73.
The present might be compared to a long-winded film from which memory and anticipation select photographic highlights.
The Art of Travel (New York: Vintage International, 2004), 15.
I’ve endured a few knocks but missed worse. I know how lucky I am, and secretly tap wood, greet the day, and grab a sneaky pleasure from my survival at long odds. The pains and insults are bearable. My conversation may be full of holes and pauses, but I’ve learned to dispatch a private Apache scout ahead into the next sentence, the one coming up, to see if there are any vacant names or verbs in the landscape up there. If he sends back a warning, I’ll pause meaningfully, duh, until something else comes to mind.
“This Old Man: Life in the Nineties,” The New Yorker, February 17, 2014.
I remember a backdrop of a brick wall I painted for a play. I painted each red brick in by hand. Afterwards it occurred to me that I could have just painted the whole thing red and put in the white lines.
I Remember (New York: Granary Books, 2001), 28.
I remember Saturday night baths and Sunday morning comics.
I Remember (New York: Granary Books, 2001), 26.
Family is like water—it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream.
Let the Great World Spin (New York: Random House, 2010), 57.
Any nostalgia I feel is literary. I remember my childhood with tears, but they’re rhythmic tears, in which prose is already being formed. I remember it as something external, and it comes back to me through external things; I remember only external things. It’s not the stillness of evenings in the country that endears me to the childhood I spent there, it’s the way the table was set for tea, it’s the way the furniture was arranged in the room, it’s the faces and physical gestures of the people. I feel nostalgia for scenes.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (London: Penguin, 2002), 183–84.
I am like you in my boyish rejection of elderliness. Antiquity—why not come right out with it? You pack a snowball on a winter day and imagine taking a belly flop on your sled as we all used to do back in the beautiful Twenties—I was ten years old in 1925. All that remains is the freshness of the impulse.
Letter to Albert Glotzer, dated April 19, 1996, in Saul Bellow: Letters (New York: Viking, 2010), 518.
Chronological time for me is rather arbitrary; I tend to see my life in waves of sorrow and ecstatic celebration. It’s fun to see how many different me’s have existed. I tend not to look back, but when you see a film it triggers a lot of memories and feelings, and that’s really a lovely opportunity. I see things that I never noticed when I was too close to them, and I remember people more fondly the more distance there is. And miss people. It’s kind of like a living breathing scrapbook that I never took the time to assemble.
Susan Sarandon’s response to the question, “What’s it like watching vintage Susan Sarandon onscreen?” quoted in “The Hot Seat” Time Out New York, September 23–29, 2010.
Our memories are card-indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.
The Unquiet Grave (New York: Persea Books, 1981), 84.