On Memory

Memory is a funny thing.

 It shifts and changes with time, altering to fit mood and desire.  A person can absolutely hate an experience, but time and good cheer can work together to color the memory and make it happy and loved.  In my travels I have seen this happen more than once to an unhappy traveler—a city despised and disliked transforms with time into a much-loved haven of happiness.  Fickle memory, as inconstant as the moon.

But memory can be honest as well, and surprising.  A small occurrence or chance happening can trigger a memory so clear, so vivid that it be said to be truly relived.  Here the senses are our greatest ally.  Smell can activate a memory; the smell of leather and horses always takes me back to the summer I spent learning to ride in the foothills of Pocatello, while the smell of a certain cologne always reminds me of a long-ago love.  Sound, too, plays on the memory.  Van Morrison’s greatest hits will forever bring to mind my parents dancing in the living room of my childhood home, a happy feeling I turn to when I feel particularly homesick.  In my recent travels, songs have taken a place of importance in memory—Michel Teló’s “Ai Se Eu Te Pego” takes me immediately to Mexico and the fun and friends I found there, while the Dirty Dancing classic “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” brings to mind (and a smile to my lips) a night of dancing in Prague.  These memories brought forward by music are as precious as the souvenirs I have collected.

One of my many literary travel companions

Books, too, recall various memories.  Books read in my childhood bring back feelings of happiness and fond remembrance (except for Where the Red Fern Grows, which I read in a middle school class and remember vividly trying pathetically to hide my profuse tears and running nose from the kids around me.  I failed.)  Books read for school evoke a spectrum of feelings—Eureka Street always brings me the thrill of discovering a new favorite, while the mere mention of Foucault makes my brain groan involuntarily.  Here, too, travel has had an influence.  I have lived two years in a foreign country, so each book read has been in a foreign (if not eventually familiar) environment.  I read passages of Nostromo on a beach in Mexico and the two complemented each other beautifully, while I read Persuasion in a German airport on an eight-hour layover.  The drama of the love story and the anticipation of a happy ending saved me from absolute boredom that day. The Lord of the Rings brings back my spring of European travels while The Great Gatsby takes me to the 141 in Warsaw, and desperately trying to finish my chapter as I walked from bus stop to preschool.  The memory of each story—its characters and plot—is thus tied entirely to my own memories of travel and experience. 

After almost two years I finally left Europe.  I am spending a brief visit at home and then I will go to China, where I will encounter new smells, sounds, and memories.  Since becoming sort of an ex-pat, this blog has been less about the books I have read and more about the places I’ve seen and the experiences I’ve had.  So while I do not intend to entirely abandon my goal of reading my list of greatest novels, this will no longer be the focus of my blog.  Instead, as I continue to read and travel, the two will continue to intertwine in experience and memory and I will do my best to record both here.