Like a match struck in a darkened room:

Cakes and Ale (so far) has addressed many things: the shifting popularity of novelists in literature, beauty, rigid societal codes, an author's talent - or lack thereof - for portraying realistic figures in literature ("We know of course that women are habitually constipated, but to represent them in fiction as being altogether devoid of a back passage seems to me really an excess of chivalry."). But a passage I read this morning has inspired more in me than all the others so far, a passage on the flickering perceptions of memory.

When asked to recall his childhood conversations with noted author Edward Driffield, the book's narrator says:

But though I couldn't remember that Driffield had ever said anything significant during those long rides of ours, I had a very acute recollection of the feel of them. [...] And sometimes the road was only a lane, with thick hawthorn hedges, and the green elms overhung it on either side so that when you looked up there was only a strip of blue sky between. And as you rode along in the warm, keen air you had a sensation that the world was standing still and life would last for ever.

I couldn't help but sigh with recognition upon reading this. Yes! Yes. That sense is imprinted somewhere deep within us, the sense that holds tight to memories of the way the light fell on certain roads, the sound of leaves crunching under foot in autumn. The brash mocking laughter of the boy I used to walk home from school with comes back easily to mind, but not what he wore, and only slightest lingering impression of his face. Like viewing a photograph in the shadows. Jonathan Lethem gave the same impression in the opening line of The Fortress of Solitude, the subject of this post - the dimming, flickering light of memory that fades in and out, images reappearing to us "like a match struck in a darkened room." A flame coming brightly and aggressively to life, then calming to a steady glow.

I've spent a fair bit of time on here striking matches, trying to illuminate and reconstruct memories from my youth. It's magical when they come back, and I can't always choose which ones return. The problem of selective memory in Maugham's reconstruction of his narrator's youth is easily solved with the artistic license of literature: in flashbacks, full conversations are easily recalled word for word when necessary. I wish this were possible. I wish I could remember everything that my grandfather ever said to me, rather than just the smell of his pipe and the sound of him shifting in his leather chair. I wish I could remember the things my great-grandmother said, instead of her silence. We can build these memories through encounters with others, piecing together a life based on common memories. It's a benefit of having a large family, each person with his or her own memory. But even then, things still remain in shadow.

But the feel of those moments. The thin curtain of smoke that occasionally circled my grandfather's head, and how it indicated that our bedtime was approaching, instilling in us the fear of sleeping in the same room as my grandmother's dress form. The tick of the clock as my great-grandmother sat wordless on the green velvet couch (even the feel of that green velvet, when rubbed the correct way, as well as the wrong way), the sound of my grandmother stirring a glass of Metamucil for her on the kitchen counter, and how these sounds marked her visits, her presence. The feel of her presence. These feelings never leave us. And this is what memory is: Feeling. Feeling is that moment when the world stands still for you, illuminated, burning as brightly as a struck match, so that you can take its picture, immortalize life in that moment, to view it later in the shadows.

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.