'The Visions Called Up By the Stories'

Only liars and the credulous trust the infallibility of their memories. The rest of us understand that memory is a creative faculty. We abhor a vacuum and fill in the holes. We embroider and accept the stitching as real. We prefer a story with a linear plot and a satisfying resolution to a collection of fragmented images. Some of our best memories never happened. On this date, June 30, in 1932, the American painter Charles Burchfield noted in his journal:

 

“It is difficult to separate actual boyhood impressions from the visions called up by the stories I read as a boy. Thus, I am never quite sure whether some of the memories of woodland rambles in luxuriant late June & early July are actually mine or those of Bevis & Mark.”

 

Burchfield’s reference is to Bevis: the Story of a Boy (1882), an adventure book by the English nature writer Richard Jefferies. Auden judged it “the only tolerable book about boyhood.” I haven’t read it but I understand Burchfield’s confusion. For me it was not so much stories that worked their way into my real-life memories as nonfiction books devoted to the natural world. To this day I’m uncertain whether I caught two cecropia moths on the trunk of a neighbor’s ash tree one morning in the early 1960’s, or I copied-and-pasted them out a field guide and onto the tree.