The Art of Memory

“Memory takes a lot of poetic license.
it omits some details; others are
exaggerated, according to the
emotional value of the articles
it touches, for memory is seated
predominantly in the heart.”
—Tennessee Williams  

I walk up the familiar red-tiled steps. Ah, the wood-framed door with its tainted yellow-glass inlays. A deep breath. I am standing in front of my early childhood home in Germany. Close to 40 years. That’s how long I have not set foot in this house. Walking down the hallways of my past, I now choose the rooms I want to see. Step by step, object by object, I am rebuilding a replica of this beloved home. “Our home, our castle,” my parents would sometimes proudly say to us kids, with a knowing smile and sweet wink.

The castle I am really building, though, is a memory castle: It exists only in my mind. 

In his oeuvre “In Search of Lost Time”, French writer Marcel Proust created his own intricate and world-famous version of such mental architecture, translating his longings into a lush landscape of his revisited past. Proust was a master at resurfacing memories, whether evoked voluntarily or stirred involuntarily by his senses, which awakened entire worlds from the past. Remember the famous ‘madeleine moment’? He dips a madeleine into his tea et voilà—time collapses into a fragrant crystal, suspending Proust between the present and the past.  

So here I am, walking through the rooms of my own childhood. Some details are faded or missing. Unlike Proust’s madeleine moment, my memories do not emerge unexpectedly—I summon them, like old companions. It’s me who is in power, it’s me who almost magically choreographs the movements of these memories, and their potency surprises me. 

Emotions hit full force. The way I can reconstruct and linger voluntarily on such incredible detail: Here’s my father’s old armchair, and the corner where I’d sit huddled listening to vinyl stories on the floor. The brown carpet! I can almost feel its texture, as if it were back in the day. Or the small table in the kitchen, so often shared between my mom, my sister and I. The smell of freshly baked bread, and, oh–! the surprise! It is my mother’s younger voice, now so clear and near, almost as if it was looking for me.

My mother’s voice, the smell of bread, the emotional tones and textures—memories I didn’t actively seek, and yet they find me. With them they carry their full emotional weight,  involuntary rushing back from the eerie shadowlands of my past, and I can deeply feel this in my heart. I realize: memory is not so much about their fading facts; it is about feelings—feelings that can call out to us.

Memory as art 

This makes memory, in a way, a form of art—a creative act of mixing what we choose to recall with what strikes the surface of our memories unexpectedly. Just as an artist doesn’t fully control what emerges when creating, I can’t always choose which memories come back to me. Memory, just like Tennessee Williams said, “takes (...) poetic license.” 

Which I find quite profound: Remembering as a creative act, orchestrated predominantly by the heart. 

So I am also learning this: to make peace. With time, and with my memories. It is my willed and wild creation in which I revisit, reshape, or soften the many objects in the encaustic of my memory. And that is how I let remembered time enrich me, instead of letting it just take from me.

The skill of loving lost time 

A similar feeling of peace was conveyed by the late author William Maxwell. In his 1997 NYT op-ed piece, ‘Nearing 90’¹, he almost fondly writes: “I liked remembering almost as much as living.” At the end of his long life, Maxwell reconciled the passage of time, and I feel like he wanted to inspire us to do the same. 

Remembering and living – two sides of the same coin. Time passes for each one of us fortunate to be alive, of course it does. And yet, loving lost time can be a skill that we can learn, by way of re-expanding what used to live in the past. Narrated time does not pass. It’s by getting lost in stories of my past that I can start to sense what Rainer Maria Rilke meant when he famously said: “Everything is here. Everything forever.”

The “Bridge of Dreams”

Back inside my memory castle, I enter my childhood room, the place where I laughed, played, fought, cried, and slept. Years collapse. Details feel enchantingly alive, and for sure I could excavate more of them if I chose. It’s like a bridge there for me to cross between different worlds—between the mystery and mundanity, past and present. Like my own “Bridge of Dreams” as symbolized in The Tale of Genji: a delicate and fleeting connection between the tangible world of reality and the realm of the dream-like. 

We can walk along the axis of time, not fixed in one moment but suspended between past, present and our future time.  What a gift this is, not only for me in the now, but also the me in the future. In bridging time, memory allows us to carry the vastness of our past into the present, creatively reshaping how we experience life. 

SO PRO(u)ST!

1. https://www.nytimes.com/1997/03/09/magazine/nearing-90.html?smid=url-share