'You Rcognize It Later from the Ache of Memory'

“I think memory and imagination belong to the same rather mysterious world of human thought. It seems to me that someone without much imagination also has a poor memory. The child who imagines nothing while playing in the corridors of a castle will remember the castle only very vaguely.” 

I’ve just learned that an old friend has died from injuries she suffered in an automobile accident. She was a grade-school teacher, a charming, intelligent woman who never got over the death of her father when she was a little girl. Ours was a friendship that tingled with the proximity of romance. The tension was always there, both of us felt it – we could talk about such things – but never acted on it. Romance, we agreed, would have ruined a valuable friendship. My memories of her are memories that mingle what was and what might have been. Once we watched a documentary about Leon Theramin, inventor of the eponymous musical instrument used on the soundtrack of old horror movies and by the Beach Boys on “Good Vibrations.” That became “our song” and I still think of her when I hear it on the radio. The irony is, it’s a song and band I never much cared for but I remember the castle in vivid detail.

 

The passage at the top is taken from an interview Vladimir Nabokov gave to a reporter for Les Langues Moderne in 1967. He goes on: “There is something in the imagination that connects to memory, and vice versa. Memory could be said to be a sort of imagination concentrated on a certain point. . . . When you remember a thing, you never remember the thing itself, you remember the relation, the association of the thing with something else. And it’s the imagination that makes this link between things.” Memory, in other words, is not a passive recording of phenomena, though some mistake it for a camera. The imagination serves as editor of memory’s first draft.

 

“Being Happy” (Pity the Beautiful, 2012) by Dana Gioia recounts a variation on the friendship I describe. It’s probably more common and perhaps results in more unhappiness. The final stanza:

 

“Being happy is mostly like that. You don’t see it up close.

You recognize it later from the ache of memory.

And you can’t recapture it. You only get to choose

whether to remember or forget, whether to feel remorse

or nothing at all. Maybe it wasn’t really love.

But who can tell when nothing deeper ever came along?”

 

One can imagine Gioia’s poem recast as a short story. Sometimes I think he, like Edwin Arlington Robinson, is a fiction writer manqué. His narrative capacity is strong.

 

[The Nabokov interview is collected in Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor (eds. Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy, 2019.)]