In
her essay “To Fashion a Text,” Annie Dillard says that “if you spend a week or
two laying out a scene or describing an event [when writing memoir], you’ve
spent more time writing about it than you did living it. The writing time is
also much more intensive. After you’ve written,” she says, “you can no longer
remember anything but the writing.”
How
curious that the writing of a memory should reduce to ashes the experience that
sparked it. The memory itself becomes codified, recorded in a fixed form, and
more “real” than the original experience. Yet how much, by its very nature, is
the recorded memory the product of conscious or unconscious embellishment or
even forgetfulness? Is it ever possible to recall a moment with absolute
fidelity to the facts of what had actually happened? Or must recall necessarily
be flawed, imperfect, a mere rendering at most?
The
writer Susan Richards Shreve says, “So much of memory comes from the beginning
of our lives when we know the world for the first time with a kind of clarity.”
I think the immediacy of impression that first experience stamps upon our
consciousness can provide this “clarity,” searing it into our memory.
Why
else would I recall so vividly now, more than fifty years later, walking up the
ramp to the loge level at Yankee Stadium as a boy and spying for the first time
the vibrant green grass of the field? In our world of black-and-white TV I had
only ever known it as gray. It was a world in which everything on the
screen—from Gunsmoke to The Flintstones—was white or black or shades of gray, as if we were watching photo
negatives come to life.
But
oh, that grass! I had never seen such green, and I was taken aback by its
sudden vibrant appearance when it came into view as I walked up the ramp. I
realized at once what I had been missing. Even today I recall the “immediacy”
of that first impression with searing clarity and entirely without
embellishment.
