Skip to content

COLUMN SIX: Bookended

Maybe the past is a dreamer best left sleeping BY COLIN BREZICKI Special to the VOICE T ime and memory go in opposite directions, it’s said, and that can make things awkward. With time it’s simple enough.
Christmas Decoration On Defocused Lights Background

Maybe the past is a dreamer best left sleeping

BY COLIN BREZICKI Special to the VOICE

Time and memory go in opposite directions, it’s said, and that can make things awkward.

With time it’s simple enough. We’re joined at the hip and have no choice but to make the most of our ride.

Memory is more complicated—there are certain places we’d rather not revisit. If time tells us where we’re heading, memory tells us where we’ve been. It can also show us who we once were, something we don’t always want to be reminded of.

Many years ago, my 11-year-old daughter chose as her class project to interview a celebrated Canadian novelist who was also a close family friend. She had read some of Richard Wright’s books and was understandably nervous about the meeting, so her mother and I assured her that he was a kind man who would quickly put her at ease.

In the end she loved doing the interview and was pleased to share the audio recording with us. Richard told me afterwards how much he had enjoyed talking with her. She asked challenging questions, he said.

It was a proud moment for her, and for us.

Time and memory have gone their separate ways since that day, 20 years ago, and everything’s different now. Richard, and his wife, Phyllis, passed away a year ago, and our family is no longer together.

Recently, my ex mentioned she had found our daughter’s recorded interview and downloaded it onto a device. Would I care to listen to it?

My answer, an unpremeditated no thanks, surprised me. It was out before I had time to think.

For whatever reason I wasn’t ready for this, and it puzzled me.

Why was I unwilling to revisit a moment in our daughter’s early life that meant so much to her and to us?

That interview with Richard Wright was something of a life-changer for her. She lives now immersed in books, having more than a thousand hardbacks arranged in bookcases and on shelves in her one-bedroom apartment. She works in a bookstore. She’s a qualified editor.

But the kicker is she didn’t want to listen to the recording either. Not just yet, she told her mother. But thanks for asking. I wanted to ask her why, but already sensing this was a private matter, I let it go. Again, I was puzzled.

A friend recently found an old VHS tape of her daughter’s wedding, 20 years ago, and offered to send it to her. But the daughter, still married and with two teenage children of her own now, politely declined.

“Thanks, Mom, but that’s okay. I don’t think I’m ready to see that yet.”

Another acquaintance, a man in his early 20s, recently confessed that he can’t bring himself to watch home movies taken when he was just learning to walk.

“It’s too much of a jolt. Too many dimensions at once,” he said. “I’m not ready to see the difference between who I was then and who I’ve become.”

Too many dimensions at once seemed a viable explanation of even a young person’s reluctance to revisit a past he’s not ready for. A video, a recorded voice, even a photograph can be a jolt, an unwelcome, in-your-face reminder of changes unnoticed along the way.

A scene in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye finds the adolescent Holden Caulfield suddenly frozen at the entrance to a natural history museum he knew as a child. It’s the dead of winter, but he’s immobilized by fear and not the cold. He remembers the museum as a place where everything stayed the same, no matter how often he visited it.

The only thing that would be different would be you, he says. Now, nearing adulthood, he stands outside the entrance, unable to go in.

I used to think he was afraid that those familiar exhibits might have been replaced in his absence over the years, though I think now maybe he feared the opposite, that the exhibits had remained exactly the same—but a reminder to him now of who he’d become in the interim.

Paul Simon, in his song, “Bookends,” tells us to preserve our memories. They’re all that’s left us, he says. I was an adolescent when the album came out, and I remember how nostalgic the song made me feel then. Now that I have so much more to be nostalgic about, it resonates even more.

He mentions having a photograph of a long time ago. It was a time of innocence, he says.

And there’s the rub, I believe. Innocence.

Were we ever conscious of innocence at the time? I don’t believe I ever was. Innocence somehow managed to find its way into my past when I wasn’t looking, being too busy dealing with life to notice what I’d left behind. And so, when I have occasion to look back, I think how untroubled those days were, how free of irritation and distress they appear in retrospect.

Now in her early 30s, my daughter has experienced many of life’s vicissitudes and reversals, its random and often unmerited assaults, its setbacks and disappointments. Along with the joys, she has known times of sadness and loss that no parent would wish for their child, even as they know those times must come.

So, do I really want to hear her sweet voice at age 11, before life took over? What else will I hear in that recording?

Will I ever be ready to hear my writer friend’s voice again as he engaged her in conversation, now that he’s gone?

Preserving memories is a delicate process best managed on our own, perhaps, as we struggle to absorb and make sense of the past at our own pace. An unexpected photograph can disrupt the equilibrium, a sudden voice from another era can shatter the stillness.

Maybe a time will come when I’ll feel like listening to that interview, and that middle-aged mother will want to see her own wedding film, and my young friend will be ready to look back at himself taking his first steps.

Maybe the time will come when memories really are all that’s left us.

Until then, I suspect we’d all prefer to crack on and deal with what lies ahead.

And we know, ultimately, what lies ahead. I will show you fear in a handful of dust, wrote T.S. Eliot.

And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. I think I finally understand F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final line in The Great Gatsby.

I get it. And I’m getting there.

 

Have a tale to tell? Share it with Column Six. [email protected]