My purpose rather has been to dramatize and illustrate the ways in which memory functions through associations, leaps, or other dislocations out of time or space and how the more profound of these occurrences can give us a new understanding of our relation to the world. Although there is an order and a consistent point of view in these essays, I have not attempted to provide a consecutive or cumulative argument. Memory as it manifests itself in organisms, mythologies, and texts, and also on the way these three elements are reflected in one another. The essays in this book became focused on the nature of From there I explored the claims made by biologists and neurologists about how organisms organize themselves and how the brain is able to collect, store, and recollect memories. In turn I began to reflect on the role that the natural world plays in lending form and consequence to our ideas of the self, of conscience, of a poem, and of scientific or mythological accounts of human origins. I began thinking about the most basic of human mnemonics, things like stars and shells, and wondered why they play such an important role in human imaginings. Soon my interest in memory broadened from cultural to natural topics. Los Angeles may not be as old as Arles, but when a branch library burns down or an apartment building is flattened it enters into the mind and into the unconscious, along with everything, whether romantic or banal, that only exists in fragments and traces, in memory.
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Walking in Rome and Arles, I had begun to think about what memory is and why it is such a consolation and a mystery.Īnyone who has lived, off and on, in the commercial wastes of southern California-where in the course of a decade a series of different buildings or forms of buildings can appear on the same site-will have a sense of absolute otherness and familiarity when walking through such ancient cities. I began to wonder at the power that a fresh encounter with ancient things had on me.
After a summer in Europe I came back to California and wrote out a few essays about cities and museums and antiquity. I began writing this book without knowing it.