Certain Things

There are certain things, I think, one will never throw out. Not mementos. These are too ostentatious, meant more for others than oneself -- Here's the the train we took to Budapest! -- too pregnant with their place of origin or of purchase. No, the things I have in mind are far most humble, far more unassuming than mementos. Aides de memoire would perhaps would be a better term. Though even that does not quite signify, because unlike aides de memoire these things are accidentally talismanic, lacking the intentional investment enjoyed by things one keeps to remember.

The things I am speaking of are things most frequently found in the bottom of drawers, at the back of file cabinets, inside books or jacket pockets. Unlike a deliberately regarded aides de memoire, these things are more surprising. They strike one, not unpleasantly, but always with some poignancy, prompting him to remember events he had forgotten. One picks up this thing, usually in the course of tidying up, regards it, loses himself in the associations it evokes, and return it to its hiding place, forgetting, unless of course he stop to record this experience -- in a blog for instance -- moments later that he had even encountered the item.

Returned to its obscurity, it waits. Until some time later, perhaps years later, one find it again, and this time remembers not only the forgotten memory with which it is associated, but also the memory of having remembered this memory before.

These things, then, are the parts of one that recede from the light of active memory. They remind one that he is aging and that he is reaching a point in his existence where he will have more memories than he will make. They are signposts on the road to his long home, and, though he neglects these humble things most of the time, he know dimly that he needs to discover them again and again. For they offer to conjure the ghosts of pleasures and sorrows which become his only consolation.