John Crowley's LJ (RSS Feed)
07-29-2008, 04:57 PM
I was reading today an article in the New York review of Books about Ian Fleming. A beautiful memorable summer morning. I read the name Jonathan Pollard (the American who spied for Israel) and felt an odd sense, not like deja vu but drawn out of some deep well and connected to summer and reading. Unlike the hundreds of these faint Huh? moments we can experience, gone before they can be analyzed, and too faint ot matter much, I caught this one. Not "Pollard" but "pollard". I was re-experiencing a summer day, weather surely like this, perhaps 1959. I was writing a Historical Novel or considered myself to be doing so. And some character or characters were somewhere in which pollarded trees were present, or seen, or described. I relished this rarefied historical/English/far-off/odd-word moment, I'm sure. And this morning I had it again, complete with its weather and its delight.
We are made of memory. Recent New Yorker article showing that sight -- what we see of the world, what pictures we make moment to moment -- are only 20% derived from immediate sensations entering through the optic nerve. The remaining 80% is memory, the memory needed to make a picture we can grasp.
(Original Post) (http://crowleycrow.livejournal.com/93723.html)
We are made of memory. Recent New Yorker article showing that sight -- what we see of the world, what pictures we make moment to moment -- are only 20% derived from immediate sensations entering through the optic nerve. The remaining 80% is memory, the memory needed to make a picture we can grasp.
(Original Post) (http://crowleycrow.livejournal.com/93723.html)