What Space is For: The forking paths of memory and return

Looking back can lead to trouble. Ask Lot’s wife, turned to salt for the sin of wanting to glimpse her home-town one last time. Ask Orpheus, who found Eurydice only to lose her again. In myth, this backward looking always leads to grief: seeking the thing you want destroys it, or you. Turning, we are inevitably turned.

But lately my days are spent looking back. I’m writing a book about an autumn spent in Italy ten years ago. I’m living where I lived at fourteen. I’ve returned to my high school as a writer-in-residence, as one of the adults pacing its perimeter, no longer the beating center of that adolescent world but part of the pastoral background. I might fade into it, seeking the past, but I’m more worried that the past itself might vanish. Isn’t this the latest word from certain neuroscientists? Memories aren’t stored like relics, they say, but re-created each time we summon them up from the depths they swim in, flat as undiscovered fish at the ocean’s bottom. Our memories are fragile beasts, and great risk comes with loosing them.

Better make it worth it, then. Every day, I sit on the top floor of the tallest building in town and pull words out of books, out of memory, out of thin air, as we say, though the air feels thick up here. My office is in a library designed by Louis Kahn, and I find books about the architect on the library’s shelves. I pore over sketches of the walls I lean against to read. “You say to brick, ‘What do you want, brick?’” Kahn once told his students. “Brick says to you, ‘I like an arch.’ If you say to brick, ‘Arches are expensive, and I can use a concrete lintel over an opening. What do you think of that, brick?’

“Brick says,” Kahn concluded, “‘I like an arch.’”

Every day, sitting on the top floor of Kahn’s library, I think, What do you want, words? Some days, they answer: a brief sentence or a long one, a parallel structure, a phrase. Some days, they scurry out of my grasp, and I spend long hours staring at the sky beyond my window, pacing the small perimeter of my office, or reading the books of others, as if my words might be hiding behind theirs. Words are both ally and enemy in my foolhardy quest to look back: they can aid memory and they can hinder it, can carry the past or slip wholly into its clothes—a changeling, doppelgänger.

________

we go back when we’ve left something behind—when, as we say, we’ve forgotten something. What have I forgotten since leaving the school? An impossible question; if I knew, I wouldn’t need to ask. I forgot about that, we say precisely when we’ve remembered it.

It’s hard to know what we have lost for sure, what we’ve left behind and won’t regain, no matter how arduously we hunt. The past can grow as nebulous as the future. “I cannot paint / What then I was,” wrote William Wordsworth after visiting the River Wye, though the past self he struggled to recall was only five years gone. I cannot paint the teenager who walked this campus, or the twenty-year-old riding a train down the spine of Italy, or the self I was yesterday, the self of an hour ago.

But every now and then the line between what is recoverable and what is truly lost becomes thick as grounded air, a mark drawn by the darkest of pens: destruction or death. Only then does remembering—turning back—reveal itself in the full extent of its fruitlessness, for the sight we hoped to see has already vanished, gone whether or not we sought it. All too often, as with Orpheus and Eurydice, the misfortune suffered was inevitable. They were never going to make it to the surface.

We know this, we...