Is this how we discover the truth,evolve?By gathering together such unconfirmed fragments?Not only of my mother but of Agnes,Rachel,Mr.Nkoma (and where is he now?)Will all of them who have remained incomplete and lost to mebecome clear and evident when I look back?Otherwise howdo we survive that forty miles of bad terrain during adolescence that we crossed without any truthful awareness of ourselves?"The self is not the principal thing."was a half-wisdomOlive Lawrence murmured to me once.
I think now of those mysterious lorries that drove up tomeet us in order to collect the unlabelled crates in silence, of the woman watching me dance with Agnes with,it seems in retrospect,such curiosity and pleasure.And the departure of Olive Lawrence, the entrance of Arthur McCash, the range of silences in The Moth...You return to that earlier time armed with the present,and no matter how dark that world was, you do not leave it unlit. You take your adult self with you. It is not to be a reliving, but a rewitnessing. Unless, of course you wish, like my sister, to damn and enact revenge on the whole pack of them.引自第114页
In any case,a couple of years after Mr.Malakite died. I bought and moved into their small timbered house protected by that walled garden. It had been a long time since I'd visitedit regularly,but almost immediately a past that felt completely erased began returning. And there was a hunger towards it Inever had when days had slipped past me at the speed of a blink. I was in The Darter's Morris and it was summer and thecloth roof of his car stretched up and folded back slowly I wasat a football match with Mr.Nkoma.I was in mid-river eating sandwixhes with Sam Malakite. "Listen," Sam Malakite says, "A thrush." And Agnes naked, to feel fullu undressed, was pullinh a green ribbon out of her hair.
That unforgotten thrush. That unforgotten ribbon.引自第127页
When you attempt a memoir,I am told,you need to be in an orphan state. So what is missing in you.and the things you have grown cautious and hesitant about,will come almostcasually towards you. “A memoir is the lost inheritance."you realize,so that during this time you must learn how and where to look.In the resulting self-portrait everything will rhyme, because everything has been reflected.If a gesture was flung away in the past,you now see it in the possession of another. So I believed something in my mother must rhyme in me. She in her small hall of mirrors and I in mine.引自第135页
