## Metadata - Author: [[Sven Birkerts]] - Full Title: The Art of Time in Memoir - Category: #books ## Highlights - Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it. —Gabriel García Márquez ([Location 46](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JYXYN0W&location=46)) - Memoir begins not with event but with the intuition of meaning—with the mysterious fact that life can sometimes step free from the chaos of contingency and become story. There is no telling when—or if—the transformation will come, and I am wary about universalizing. ([Location 65](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JYXYN0W&location=65)) - No, “perspective” isn’t quite right, for that suggests a fixed, even static arrangement. ([Location 71](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JYXYN0W&location=71)) - the search for patterns and connections is the real point—and glory—of the genre. ([Location 94](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JYXYN0W&location=94)) - Geoffrey Wolff’s The Duke of Deception, Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life, Frank Conroy’s Stop-Time, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face, Blake Morrison’s And When Did You Last See Your Father?, Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family, Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood, Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation, Jo Ann Beard’s The Boys of My Youth, Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments, Maureen Howard’s Facts of Life, Rick Moody’s The Black Veil, and Clark Blaise’s I Had a Father. ([Location 105](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JYXYN0W&location=105)) - Apart from whatever painful or disturbing events they recount, their deeper ulterior purpose is to discover the nonsequential connections that allow those experiences to make larger sense; they are about circumstance becoming meaningful when seen from a certain remove. ([Location 112](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JYXYN0W&location=112)) - Ezra Pound’s beautiful lines, “What thou lovest well remains, / the rest is dross.” ([Location 131](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JYXYN0W&location=131)) - What did my so-called real memories add up to? What were they telling me that was different from the authorized version I had of my life? ([Location 133](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JYXYN0W&location=133)) - way before he experienced the breakthrough that led him to undertake the all-consuming discipline of Remembrance. It was only when he had his madeleine moment that he grasped the power of the other kind of memory, Bergson’s involuntary memory, and understood that this alone was the gateway to the real past. ([Location 153](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JYXYN0W&location=153)) - What happened—at least according to literary legend—was that the author, revisiting as an adult one of the sites of his childhood, stopped to take tea. When he automatically dunked the crusty little cake—the famous petite madeleine—into his tea, he found that his unpremeditated action released a stored association of overwhelming force. A single taste suddenly swamped him with the charged-up sensation of childhood, over-powering all factual ordering, and in the light of this visceral reaction his former approaches to his remembered experience came to seem irrelevant. The vital past, the living past, he realized, could not be systematically excavated; it lay distilled in the very details that had not been groomed into story, details that could only be fortuitously discovered. The madeleine experience initiated for him a whole chain of association, and from this he achieved the eventual restoration of an entire vanished world. ([Location 156](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JYXYN0W&location=156)) - The following of such thematic designs through one’s life should be, I think, the true purpose of autobiography. ([Location 188](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JYXYN0W&location=188))