“This must bring back a lot. Mama,” he says. She looks out the window of the train. Through the window: her childhood trees: poplars, cypresses, furled in upon themselves
like rolled umbrellas.
Bring back from
where? And to what?
She’s always
surprised at how free people feel to speak of memory. They imagine it a liquid, mobile, a stream
that flows in one direction only. They
speak of it as though they could return to something navigable, something they
can enter any time at will. No sense for
them that the small, fragile boat in which they find themselves will fail to
protect them. No possibility for them of the wrecked craft, the splinters and
the skeleton hurled up. Memory: the cataract, the overwhelming flood. And the freezing power of horror, of shock,
when memory stops dead and nothing moves on the gray, windless plain, the place
of stone, blind stone, and you inhabit it because you must, it is the only
place, you must choose it or death by
drowning.
“THE REST OF LIFE”
Mary Gordon 1993
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