Here I come to the memoir writer’s difficulties—one of the reasons why, though I read so many, so many are failures. They leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: “This is what happened”; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened. And the events mean very little unless we know first to whom they happened. Who was I then?
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When I try to see her I see more distinctly how our lives are pieces in a pattern and to judge one truly you must consider how this side is squeezed and that indented and a third expanded and none are really isolated...
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These scenes, by the way, are not altogether a literary device—a means of summing up and making innumerable details visible in one concrete picture. ... Whatever the reason may be, I find that scene making is my natural way of marking the past. Always a scene has arranged itself: representative, enduring. This confirms me in my instinctive notion (it will not bear arguing about; it is irrational): the sensation that we are sealed vessels afloat on what it is convenient to call reality; and at some moments, the sealing matter cracks; in floods reality; that is, these scenes—for why do they survive undamaged year after year unless they are made of something comparatively permanent? Is this liability to scenes the origin of my writing impulse? Are other people also scene makers? These are questions to which I have no answer. Perhaps sometimes I will consider it more carefully. Obviously I have developed the faculty, because, in all the writing I have done, I have almost always had to make a scene, . . . when I am writing about a person; I must find a representative scene in their lives. . .
When I try to see her I see more distinctly how our lives are pieces in a pattern and to judge one truly you must consider how this side is squeezed and that indented and a third expanded and none are really isolated...
These scenes, by the way, are not altogether a literary device—a means of summing up and making innumerable details visible in one concrete picture. ... Whatever the reason may be, I find that scene making is my natural way of marking the past. Always a scene has arranged itself: representative, enduring. This confirms me in my instinctive notion (it will not bear arguing about; it is irrational): the sensation that we are sealed vessels afloat on what it is convenient to call reality; and at some moments, the sealing matter cracks; in floods reality; that is, these scenes—for why do they survive undamaged year after year unless they are made of something comparatively permanent? Is this liability to scenes the origin of my writing impulse? Are other people also scene makers? These are questions to which I have no answer. Perhaps sometimes I will consider it more carefully. Obviously I have developed the faculty, because, in all the writing I have done, I have almost always had to make a scene, . . . when I am writing about a person; I must find a representative scene in their lives. . .
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