Lost Times/Recovered Times

Abstract

Introduction:  This is an exercise in memory, of the re-construction of experience, filtered, changed as it must be, by a consciousness that is the result of that experience and all the ones that preceded and followed, reconstructed, all, in their turn. Complex, but like all experiences, at once, noble and farcical. Of another exercise in memory, currently spanning two volumes, soon to be six, the late novelist Henry Roth wrote, One thinks that all this must vanish, the good and the bad, the treasured and detested, my heritage, my identity, must vanish with me, save for slight evocations, occasional distillation of eloquence preserved in print; all else must vanish, and eventually, even that too. From time immemorial, nay, ever since the universe became conscious of itself, in the form of Homo sapiens, the toll for that supreme privilege’ has been consciousness of mortality - the toll, with all its overtures. The cry of every human has been, ‘And when 1 crumble, who will remember?!’ Often have 1 imagined the rain leaching out memory, the wind making sport of it. «¹