So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
–F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
I have often wondered why it is that some slight and unremarkable memories remain strongly embedded in our waking consciousness while others apparently more memorable are quickly buried, if not forgotten. Yet we possess these latter hidden memories as much as we possess the forgettably banal ones. They each come to us unbidden from time to time in dreams, or are perhaps more often prompted by the discovery of a faded photograph, or a chance meeting with a long-lost acquaintance. Experience teaches us that memory and reason have little to do with one another. While we mistakenly believe that we possess memory, albeit one that fails as we age, it is more accurate to say that we are ourselves involuntarily possessed by it, ‘borne back’ to it, in Nick Carraway’s words at the end of Fitzgerald’s great novel; we are manacled to it, as we are, each of us, captive to our own unreliable witness to past events.
My name is Edward Mason, an adopted surname of convenience, but not by my own choice. Yet I prefer it to Eduard Marek, my name at birth, and am still Eduard in my shadow self, so to speak, though I often forget this, as I am a hostage to my own past, as we all are to some extent ourselves, and yet I am a mystery even to myself. Perhaps we all are mysteries to our own selves, if each for very different reasons.
The whiff of a distinctive odour, instantly and forever associated for us with a particular time and place, or a snatch of familiar music heard above the hubbub of a crowd of strangers, can trigger the memory of an experience so intense that we marvel to have forgotten it. The taste of a madeleine dipped in tea abruptly re-awakened his childhood for the narrator of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. The smell of diesel fuel vividly recalls to me my first bus ride on a double decker in the rain of an autumn twilight. I can never hear the moody clarinet of Acker Bilk’s Stranger on the Shore without recalling my own exile from my childhood home with a painful joy, though years have passed, and that home is thousands of miles away. It is understandable that we should seek to suppress memories of traumatic or painful events, shutting them away in a dark vault where we would prefer not to venture, and retain in a handy top drawer of our minds pleasant memories of holidays and personal achievements, of the face of a beloved friend or relative, or of a place forever radiated with happy souvenirs. But there are some few curious events in our past that recur unsummoned from the depths of memory, in quiet moments, for some inscrutable purpose, and these defy such easy categorization. We cannot always connect the dots, and sometimes prefer not to. The following is one of these.
