stop making sense

What is it to be caught at the back end of a memory?

Our elders often say that age brings with it the rediscovery of youth: a newer, fresher appreciation of childhood, of innocence, etc. As if to be old, in turn, is to learn how to be young; or rather how to treat the property or period of life we call youth. The theme is recurrent in the work of W.G. Sebald. As doctor Selwyn descends deeper into his own existential crisis, he opens the door to his earliest experiences as a child, and they offer him something.

I walked past a park today that recalls many childhood memories. This withstanding, I confess that such a place rarely to never presses itself into my mind. But today I thought about this park, and its infamous tunnel, "Medusa's Cave", a name that to this day perks middle school students' ears in the surrounding schools. As a public schooler, the journey through Medusa's Cave epitomized the move from youth to young manhood: one went in a boy, and came out a step closer to something else. With a girl clinching your arm, all breath and cheerful fret, who couldn't agree it was thrilling? As I walked, I remembered the times I myself had stumbled through the cave, and the people I had stumbled with. I recalled the delicate sound of moving water, the reverberation of voices as they echoed through the vast darkness, the looming threat of an unexpected encounter. I even remembered a girlfriend standing next to the entrance one mellow summer evening, her outline perfectly traced into the landscape of a mental photograph. When people describe experiences with the dead, with ghosts, they may indeed only be using a trope to describe the experience or play of memory. Memory is always the true ghost, since it alone can be shown to haunt and leaves psychical imprints. And though it may never compete with the immediacy of the senses, it strikes stronger in its absence. I turn to Sebald:

"On the morning of the 23rd I took the train from Zurich to Lausanne. As the train slowed to cross the Aare bridge, approaching Berne, I gazed way beyond the city to the mountains of the Oberland. At that point, as I recall, or perhaps merely imagine, the memory of Dr Selwyn returned to me for the first time in a long while. [...] And so they are ever returning to us, the dead. At times they come back from the ice more than seven decades later and are found at the edge or the moraine, a few polished bones and a pair of hobnailed boots." -- The Emigrants