some quotations on memories

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

some quotations on memories (from people who are not psychologists),
collected in connection with writing of mine that i describe as
"autobiographical fiction or fictionalized autobiography":


One thing was clear: *my* recollection had been almost wholly
inaccurate; my father did not escape [from Russia] in the dead of
night and did not bring his own father with him.  How I came by that
tale remains a mystery.  Perhaps I invented it to supply some version
of a father-son cooperative venture which in fantasy held enormous
appeal for me because of the lack of communion with my own father.
Or perhaps my father himself told the story, producing it out of some
obscure wish to save us both from what he took to be a less
digestible truth.  In any case I believe I have made the point that I
know almost nothing of my father's past (and perhaps secondarily also
provided an apologue of how both "first-hand" accounts and the
historian himself can create obstacles to "reconstructing the past").

[Martin Duberman, "On Becoming an Historian", _The Uncompleted Past_
(E. P. Dutton, N.Y., 1971), pp. 342-3.]


[He] successfully promoted, in retrospect, a version that suited his
purposes (and had probably, by then, displaced the actual event in
his memory).

[Stephen J. Gould, "Knight Takes Bishop?", _Bully for Brontosaurus_
(W. W. Norton, N.Y., 1991), p. 398.]


Memory is overlaid with later memory, mangled by self-justification
and self-pity, guarded by self-interest, rent by great gaps of
forgetfulness.

[Herbert Simon, "Introduction", _Models of My LIfe_ (Basic Books,
1991), p. xvii.  note: this is simon's autobiography.]


Nothing has more marked the literature of our time than the blurring
of fact and fiction, the discovery that "fact" is difficult to
establish, that "fiction" is by no means confined to the realm of
fantasy, that both are contrived to provide us with story, the
ordering of events into narrative.

[Carolyn G. Heilbrun, "Vera Brittain's _Testament of Experience_",
_Hamlet's Mother and Other Women_ (Columbia Univ. Press, N.Y., 1990),
p. 39.]


"My childhood is like a dream," I said.  "I'm not sure it's possible
to look at it with too much expectation of meaning.  I'm not even
sure you're supposed to.  Expect too much from memory."

"And you don't mind?"

"No.  In some ways it is a relief not to have to understand everything."

[Susanna Moore, _In the Cut_ (Knopf, N.Y., 1995), p. 141.]

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