Point to Point Navigation

TWENTY-TWO

I left myself at the end of my first memoir, Palimpsest, in the year 1964, when I was thirty-nine. It is now April 2005. I am in Los Angeles and at the beginning of May I shall have a cataract removed from my left eye. Everything they say about age proves to be true. For years I read to my blind grandfather and even led him onto the floor of the Senate. I also remember practicing being blind, eyes shut and walking, with arms outstretched. In World War Two, when we learned of the discovery of radar, my grandfather said, “Every blind man learns from personal experience about radar. As you walk toward a wall, say, you can feel the sound start to bounce off the wall, the principle on which radar is based.” Although he was not given to self-pity he did complain how slow reading was for him, being unable to glance through a book and determine what, if anything, was worth reading in it. He also had his own special marginal symbols for important passages. If there was something he might want to quote in a speech he would say “Q,” which one would write in the margin next to the passage to be remembered. In old age he lacked the phenomenal aural memory of his youth when he used to bemuse the Senate with long lists of statistics that he had memorized, all the time holding a text in his hand which he pretended to read.

“I now grow forgetful,” wrote Montaigne in old age. “Names refuse to come when bidden.” It is encouraging to know that Montaigne who had read and reread everything worried about loss of memory, too. He was also fascinated by the process of memory: after all, he was the first great memoirist of life not only as lived by himself but as reported by others and written down.

“Off I go,” Montaigne writes, “rummaging about in books for sayings which please me—not so as to store them up (for I have no storehouses) but so as to carry them back to the book, where they are no more mine than they were in their original place. We only know, I believe, what we know now: ‘knowing’ no more consists in what we once knew than in what we shall know in the future…”

It has been my experience that writers, myself included, often forget what they have written since the act of writing is simply a letting go of a piece of one’s own mind, and so there is a kind of mental erasure as it finds its place on a page in order to leap to another consciousness like a mutant viral strain. I have just recorded Jane Bowles’s uncharacteristic behavior as jealous wife only to recall that I had already quoted her letters to Paul in Palimpsest.