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Only once in your life, I truly believe, you find someone who can completely turn your world around. You tell them things that you’ve never shared with another soul and they absorb everything you say and actually want to hear more. You share hopes for the future, dreams that will never come true, goals that were never achieved and the many disappointments life has thrown at you. When something wonderful happens, you can’t wait to tell them about it, knowing they will share in your excitement. They are not embarrassed to cry with you when you are hurting or laugh with you when you make a fool of yourself. Never do they hurt your feelings or make you feel like you are not good enough, but rather they build you up and show you the things about yourself that make you special and even beautiful. There is never any pressure, jealousy or competition but only a quiet calmness when they are around. You can be yourself and not worry about what they will think of you because they love you for who you are. The things that seem insignificant to most people such as a note, song or walk become invaluable treasures kept safe in your heart to cherish forever. Memories of your childhood come back and are so clear and vivid it’s like being young again. Colours seem brighter and more brilliant. Laughter seems part of daily life where before it was infrequent or didn’t exist at all. A phone call or two during the day helps to get you through a long day’s work and always brings a smile to your face. In their presence, there’s no need for continuous conversation, but you find you’re quite content in just having them nearby. Things that never interested you before become fascinating because you know they are important to this person who is so special to you. You think of this person on every occasion and in everything you do. Simple things bring them to mind like a pale blue sky, gentle wind or even a storm cloud on the horizon. You open your heart knowing that there’s a chance it may be broken one day and in opening your heart, you experience a love and joy that you never dreamed possible. You find that being vulnerable is the only way to allow your heart to feel true pleasure that’s so real it scares you. You find strength in knowing you have a true friend and possibly a soul mate who will remain loyal to the end. Life seems completely different, exciting and worthwhile. Your only hope and security is in knowing that they are a part of your life.”
― Bob Marley

When someone you love dies, and you’re not expecting it, you don’t lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time—the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes—when there’s a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she’s gone, forever—there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.

John Irving

Suspension of disbelief

It was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth on the other hand was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us.[4]

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Judith Barrington

In “Interiors”, I tell a story which seems connected to what you recount about the local teacher, particularly when you say “to discover one’s memory to have been so absolutely wrong entailed working through a real fear that she, herself, might disappear with the revelation.” I had a similar experience of discovering that I’d remembered something entirely wrong. I describe it in that essay as a sensation similar to when one wakes up and can’t figure where one is: a sensation of falling into a void. What occurs to me here is something that, for me, was a central issue in writing memoir. A central fear or block, perhaps. I felt instinctively that if I wrote down, and shaped and revised, my story as best I could remember it, then I would be left only with the written artefact—not with any “genuine” memory of the experiences. I had a sense that the writing would replace the memory, and that it would be fixed. Rather as a photograph becomes the picture one remembers of someone. For some reason, this frightened me. I saw it as a step in losing my memory altogether, perhaps. Anyway, when I did write the memoir, Lifesaving, I discovered that my fears were entirely true, but also that it didn’t matter. If I hadn’t fixed those memories into the words on the page, then probably they would have become fixed just through the act of remembering over and over. In fact, in the last chapter of Lifesaving, I describe a breakthrough that occurred when I saw something in a movie that shifted my repeated memories and gave me a new perspective. But those memories had, in fact, become fixed, just as they would, in new words, become fixed when I wrote them down. As for how remembering is the same or different than artistic expression—well, I tend to think that the very act of working with language to refine and pinpoint meaning, is a kind of refining of memory itself. Sometimes, in the act of revising, and struggling to convey the “truth” of an experience, the memories become clearer, new memories emerge, remembering becomes more nuanced. I’m a great believer in the power of language itself to talk back to the writer. I think the work of revision—of trying to make sentences rhythmic, varied, colorful, etc.—actually deepens memory and understanding.

“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured.

― Herman Hesse