memory

In a morbid condition of the brain, dreams often have a singular actuality, vividness, and extraordinary semblance of reality.  At times monstrous images are created, but the setting and the whole picture are so truth-like and filled with details so delicate, so unexpectedly, but so artistically consistent, that the dreamer, were he an artist like Pushkin or Turgenev even, could never have invented them in the waking state.  Such sick dreams always remain long in the memory and make a powerful impression on the overwrought and deranged nervous system.

Just as there exists in writing a literal truth and a poetic truth, there also exists in a human being a literal anatomy and a poetic anatomy.  One, you can see; one, you cannot. One is made of bones and teeth and flesh; the other is made of energy and memory and faith.  But they are both equally true.

How do we remember to remember?  That's a question I've asked myself often since my time on Duma Key, often in the small hours of the morning, looking up into the absence of light, remembering absent friends.  Sometimes in those little hours I think about the horizon.  You have to establish the horizon.  You have to mark the white.  A simple enough act, you might say, but any act that re-makes the world is heroic.  Or so I've come to believe. ~~as stated by Edgar in 'Duma Key'

Deciding to remember, and what to remember, is how we decide who we are.

“... But at a certain point the memory of her stopped accompanying me everywhere I went.  She stayed behind, the way a city stays behind as a train pulls out of the station.  It’s there, somewhere behind you, and you could go back and make sure of it.  But why should you?”

A pleasure is only full grown when it is remembered.

I’d almost forgotten how to smoke. Doreen gave me a light with the console lighter and I nearly choked drawing the creamy smoke into my pink little lungs. The taste was bitter yet rich. Smoking was just like riding a bike---I quickly got the hang of it again. It felt good to kill off a few useless cells.

The Zen masters have the right idea--no pain no gain:  thwack a silly nebbish and he'll remember it far longer and more indelibly than any words you muster at him.  Not absolutely everything can or should have to be explained, and particularly not to everybody.  But a concussion is a value-judgment anyone gets the point of.

Live out of your imagination instead of out of your memory.

We shook hands. Norm’s hand felt like salted mackerel. Our brief interaction had put him in a talkative mood. “There’s no business like shoe business,” he uttered with a death rattle laugh, heh heh, peering at me sideways like a depraved cherub as he droned on and on about the good old days in the shoe business, the bonus money and the belles whose stockinged ankles he fondled when he could still get a boner … but my mind was elsewhere. I couldn’t stop thinking about Luke Soloman, Luke Soloman, Luke Soloman. Who was this character?