A Defense of Ardor: Essays by Adam Zagajewski

Author:Adam Zagajewski
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Essays, Literary Criticism, Literary Collections, Poetry
ISBN: 9781466884236
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2004-09-28T23:00:00+00:00

5 Beginning to Remember

Beginning to remember! While the person we know and admire is still alive—even if he lives far off—remembering remains peaceful, lazy, and pointillist. The memory doesn’t yet strive for a synthetic, unified vision. It calmly drifts from spot to spot; it skips from one episode to another like children playing hopscotch. We say: But do you remember the trip to Meaux? Do you remember Christmas Eve in Berlin, Zbigniew’s bass voice singing carols? Do you remember the visit to the Hôpital Saint-Louis? Do you remember the bouquet he brought you that time?

After the person’s death, everything changes. The memory grows sober and settles down to its great labor. This time its goal is synthesis. It longs to catch and combine all the scraps and pieces it recalls, along with the thoughts they inspired, into a single portrait. In the first weeks and months after the loss of a great friend the memory repeats: it’s still too soon, I still can’t see, let’s wait a bit. But then the first anniversary of the death draws near, time swims past like an Olympic freestyler and suddenly you have to hurry, suddenly it seems that no task is more pressing. And at the same time it turns out that we’re dealing with an unfinished project, with a process of remembering that can’t be seen through to its conclusion. Of course, you can write down some recollections, reach the words “the end,” send the text off to the printer—only to realize a few days later that you’ve forgotten something, left something out. Often the most important thing! And so on, and so on.

It also turns out that we have at least two kinds of memory. One is intelligent, educated, not only able but eager to synthesize; this is the memory that sets forth large outlines, rational theses, vivid colors. But there’s also her humbler sister, the memory of little snapshots, fleeting instants, a single-use camera producing atoms of recollection, which are not only unsuitable for enlargement and standardization, but even take pride in their absolutely idiomatic nature. And it is this memory—small, quick, acute—that refuses death, will not agree to alter completely its system for archiving recollections. And thanks to this, it retains more life, more freshness in its flashes. It keeps repeating: remember, remember, remember … and after each “remember” another slide from its vast repository lights up. It’s useless, though, to request a specific moment, a specific day. This memory is as capricious as a librarian who thinks her paycheck is a disgrace and takes her revenge on innocent supplicants by pulling from the files only those photos that strike her fancy.

The mystery that every powerful personality conceals doesn’t open up before us simply because the person who bore that mystery is no longer living. We saw the greatness of the person who died during his lifetime. We also saw his weaknesses and didn’t dare to link them with his virtues, or perhaps we didn’t know how. Now, when

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.