'There Was an Escape But Into the Past'

Most Sunday mornings I call my brother in Cleveland and our conversations ramble and digress like good essays for an hour or so. We start with the obvious stuff – kids, jobs, health, even weather – and inevitably settle on what Henry James called “excursions of memory.” Not another soul in the world would find them interesting or memorable but with age trivial events recalled after half a century or more seem ridiculously significant. It’s almost as though remembering something confers meaning on it, a rather vain and silly presumption. 

All week I think of people and events from long ago, make some notes and see if Ken remembers them and whether our memories comport. He does the same. I’m two and a half years older so my memory is slightly longer if not necessarily better. Some memories are cul-de-sacs spawning mysteries – the fate of our blind cousin in Florida with cerebral palsy, for instance. The only time we met him was in 1968, when we stayed with Terry and our aunt and uncle for a week in Tampa. Subsequently: a blank. Nothing. Ken has preserved a single photograph of him. Both of us observed this week that photos blur into memories, a sort of Platonic confusion. Is the memory “real”?

 

Henry James writes in “New York Revisited,” the second chapter in The American Scene (1906), composed after his return to the U.S. for the first time in twenty years:

 

“My recovery of impressions, after a short interval, yet with their flush a little faded, may have been judged to involve itself with excursions of memory--memory directed to the antecedent time--reckless almost to extravagance. But I recall them to-day, none the less, for that value in them which ministered, at happy moments, to an artful evasion of the actual. There was no escape from the ubiquitous alien into the future, or even into the present; there was an escape but into the past.”