Every once in a while, a book will stir a very specific memory.
It's not a common occurrence, even if you read relentlessly, but when it happens, it's a delight. What I mean when I say this is simple: you're in the middle of a story and carried along with the flow of it, when all of a sudden the author describes something you know. It could be a particular type of car, or a very specific place you know personally. All of a sudden, your story and the story being told intersect with one another, and you say, "Hey, I know that place!"
Like last year, in the opening chapters of an ultimately pretty mediocre fantasy/horror novel, the protagonist went on a date, and took his soon-to-be paramour to one of my favorite special-occasion restaurants in the DC area. "Hey," I said, "they're going to L'Auberge!"
I'm deep into a re-read of Thomas Merton's spiritual memoir THE SEVEN STOREY MOUNTAIN, which I last read thirty years ago. I was in my late twenties, and in the fierce first throes of exploring my calling to ministry, and I remember finding Merton's journey of spiritual discovery profoundly resonant and delightfully written.
I'm in my late fifties now, and I find myself resonating to Merton just as deeply, but differently. He wrote the book when he was in his early thirties, meaning it rises from a soul of roughly the same vintage as I was when I first encountered him.
Now, his writing still delights, but I'm essentially encountering it anew. Of course I am. More years have passed between my first reading and now than I'd lived when I first read the book. My recollection of it is like my memory of a place I might have visited for a few days three decades ago. Meaning, a scattering of sense impressions and visual images, and very few specific memories.
On one particular page, the memory of that first reading came rushing back, along with a wash of other memories. It was from Merton's description of the death of his father, and the subsequent funeral:
Tom got an obituary printed in the Times, and he saw to it that the funeral went off more or less decently: but it was still another one of those cremations. This time it was at Golders Green. The only difference was that the minister said more prayers, and the chapel looked a little more like a chapel, and Tom had got them to hide the coffin under a very beautiful shroud of silk from the Orient somewhere, China or Bali or India.But in the end they took the shroud off and rolled the coffin through one of those sliding doors and then, in the sinister secrecy of the big, intricate crematory, out of our sight, the body was burned, and we went away.
When I was a boy of twelve, I lived fifty yards from where Merton's father was cremated.
If you stood at our front door, and looked slightly to the left from the little semi-detached we were renting in London, you'd see the grounds of the Golders Green Crematorium cattycorner across Meadway Gate. It was an elegant brick building, subtle towers and arches standing stark behind a brick wall on Hoop Lane, with memorial gardens tastefully nestled behind the main structure. I'd pass it whenever I walked to the Tube, or was coming back from taking the double decker bus from St. John's Wood on days I had after school band practice at the American School in London. I'd see the memorial gardens when I took the walking path to the Hampstead Heath extension, and the place always seemed beautiful in a sad sort of way.
"Hey," I'd said once and said again, "I know that place."
I recalled, thirty years ago, marvelling that Merton had spent a meaningful moment in a place that I knew intimately. As a young man, it stirred memories of when I was a boy. As a middle-aged man? It was a peculiar metamnemonic moment, a memory of my own act of remembering, mingled with the remembered story of another soul.
Human memory is not like stored data, but ever in flux, shared in such gloriously imprecise and idiosyncratic ways, layered and relayered with feeling and image and meaning.
Posts
