The story is so familiar that I now remember the event from my mother’s perspective: my mind’s eye sees, framed in the doorway, an old wardrobe worthy of Narnia, leaning against the bed, which has interrupted its fall. I understand that the boy – me, or my son – is inside. But Professor Kirke built [...]
Autobiographical Memories
Here are some autobiographical pieces I worked on between 2006 and 2008. Each of them is 100 words long, and each describes a single memory, dwelling on a particular instance from my life and conveying my subjective recollection of it.
For more of the background, see What is an autobiographical memory?
She pushed past, and suddenly my mother was strange to me. The front door slammed, then the car door, I feel sure, and my memory narrates the getaway with cinematic melodrama: screeching tyres, a furious engine. Dad explained that this was what women sometimes did, and this was explanation enough at the time – learning [...]
“The world is wide,” I thought; then, feebly, “The world is whole.” These thoughts did not begin as words, of course – what we feel as we walk down or up the hill to meet our lovers after work, smelling the end of winter, cannot be contained within inverted commas. But my fidgeting mind cannot [...]
I read the new translation, and try to recreate an earlier experience, when the text’s artful magic resonated with the real magic of Christmas, as I saw it. Alone with a pencil and those pristine pages, I sat by the bay windows, seeing people pass while Gawain accepted the challenge. But we cannot re-live moments: [...]
I held the book between my fingers: its thickness impressed me as I realised that knowledge was something physical. I tracked my consumption of these words, seeing where my bookmark had reached, using fingers to estimate if I was halfway yet. It was with me for months in France: I chose its company, on the [...]