`What Is Hidden Everywhere'

In traffic, waiting for the light, I smelled diesel exhaust from the bus in front of me and then it’s 1964, I’m 12 years old, and I’m riding the No. 51 bus on West 25th Street, headed downtown to visit bookstores and a magic shop, none of which has existed for decades. That’s my working-class American version of a madeleine dipped in tea, with Cleveland as my Combray. One of my history professors often said he would rather have five minutes of conversation from the streets of Athens in the age of Pericles than a newly discovered dialogue by Plato. That’s how I feel about 1964 – five minutes of quotidian Middle America, only the trivial things -- Rice-A-Roni, slang, the color of our socks, the strange newness of saying “President” Johnson, my grandmother’s crabbed left hand two years after her stroke, and a pile of Doc Savage reprints from Bantam. Here’s Howard Moss in The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust:

“We contain within ourselves every lost moment of our lives. It is necessary to be made aware that they are lost before we can regain them. Music informs us of this loss without specifying the nature of what we have relinquished. Like time, it tells us everything and nothing.

“Involuntary memories are forms of ecstasy, `mnemonic resurrections’ that do not contain earlier experiences so much as new truths. Sensations of the past are not duplications but sensation itself. Destroying the material world temporarily, they put in its place a world of revelation akin to the spiritual experiences of mystics…”

Such rare transports possess more conviction and vividness than any movie. My oldest son reminded me that Saturday was the 43rd anniversary of the first appearance by the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. He, born in 1987, sent me the YouTube video, and said, “It’s so simple but it still gives me chills.” No kidding – little things, like Paul and George sharing a chorus on “All My Loving” and Ringo’s moronic grin. This mental conceit of recapturing the past (the mirror image of kids wishing they were grownups) is common, especially among the middle-aged and elderly, who have more past to recapture. In an untitled poem, Samuel Menashe, now 81, writes:

“Always
When I was a boy
I lost things –
I am still
Forgetful –
Yet I daresay
All will be found
One day.”

And from another Menashe poem, “Reeds Rise from Water”:

“At every instant I expect
what is hidden everywhere.”

Memory contains – or creates – more than we suspect.