Sisley, Rest Along the Stream, Edge of the Wood, 1878
Memory begins to qualify the imagination, to give it another
formation, one that is peculiar to the self. I remember isolated, yet
fragmented and confused, images–and images, shifting, enlarging, is the word,
rather than moments or events–which are mine alone and which are especially
vivid to me. They involve me wholly and immediately, even though they are the
disintegrated impressions of a young child. They call for a certain attitude of
belief on my part now; that is, they must mean something, but their best
reality does not consist in meaning. They are not stories in that sense, but
they are story-like, mythic, never evolved but evolving ever. There are such
things in the world: it is their nature to be believed; it is not necessarily
in them to be understood. Of all that must have happened to and about me in
those my earliest days, why should these odd particulars alone be fixed in my
mind? If I were to remember other things, I should be someone else.
N. Scott Momaday
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