From Grace's Day

And finally one must take into account the remarkable fact that in general men experience the present naïvely, so to speak, without being able to estimate its content; they must first place it at a distance, i.e., the present must have become the past before one can win from it points of vantage from which to gauge the future.

—Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion

A fictive tale even has the advantage of manifesting symbolic necessity more purely, to the extent that we may believe its conception arbitrary.

—Jacques Lacan, Seminar on "The Purloined Letter"

Grace

There were three islands and they were childhood, youth, and age. I went in search of my father through every one. Like a foolish traveller, I thought I knew where I was going, but I could never have known. Not until the end, and by then, as always in these matters, it was too late.

A long time ago I had two sisters and we lived on the first island. Our house had two doors, one to the south, one to the north. Its garden looked towards the setting sun. It was a garden of apple trees and fuchsia and everything in it leaned away from the wind. Dry stone walls encircled it and sheep and children broke them down. My mother lived there with us. Boats came and went bringing food and sometimes sheep, and there were times when we lived by catching fish and rabbits, though we were not so good at either. Richard Wood came in the Iliad, his wooden yawl, always it seemed when a gale of wind was threatened. He dropped his anchor in the sound and stayed for nights at a time. Mother said he liked his home comforts. He was younger than her, though not by much, and she was younger than father. Father liked to come first, she said. In summer time we swam naked in the crystal water and saw his anchor bedded in the sand, the marks the chain left where it swung to tide or wind. Many a time I swam down that chain, hauling myself deeper hand over hand until I could stand on the bottom. But he took no notice. In calm weather we could see my footprints on the seabed, as if I lived down there and had stood a long time in one place looking up. Or perhaps that was not how it happened. Words have that way of invading memory, the stories they tell us become our stories. What I remember and what I forget may be one and the same thing, or they may merely depend upon each other. And what my father remembered for me.

Jeannie

My first memory, the first memory that I can certainly say wasn't given to me by someone else, is of my father hoisting me onto his shoulders so that I could see something. We're in a crowd and my mother Jane is there. I don't remember whether Grace is there or not and I don't know what it is that I want to see. It must have been before Em was born. What I remember most clearly is the enormous sense of safety and sureness coupled with a giddy vertigo. I remember looking down on the crowd. Many men wear cloth caps and the women wear scarves, as they did still in those days, and my father is smoking a pipe and I can smell the tobacco. One man turns and says something like, What you think of that then Tom? And Tom takes the pipe from his mouth, releasing my leg in the process, and says something I don't catch. Even now it only needs someone to light a pipe outside a restaurant for a great wave of security to possess me. Tom was not a tall man but from the height of his shoulders everyone around looked small. Hold on, Jeannie, he said to me, and swung round and moved through the crowd and out onto the street and there I see a horse, a man is holding him by...