Bokelskere.no

In my book I try to talk about the way we organize perceptions into stories with beginnings, middles, and ends, how our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're reimagined in words.

That is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and outside, and it sometimes happens that we don't notice the threshold has been crossed.

There's always some hope in anger, I think, hope for things to be different

Memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn't a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old word.s

It's obvious that there are stories that can't be told without pain to others or to oneself, that autobiography is fraught with questions of perspective, self-knowledge, repression, and outright delusion.

I think we all have ghosts inside us, and it's better when they speak than when they don't. After my father died, I couldn't talk to him in person anymore, but I didn't stop having conversations with him in my head. I didn't stop seeing him in my dreams or stop hearing his words.

It's ironic, though, because in my book I try to talk about the way we organize perceptions into stories with beginnings, middles, and ends, how our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're reimagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense. But then, that woman isn't interested in the problem of consciousness and reality. She doesn't give a jot about philosophy. These journalists actually believe they can get the real story, the objective truth, or tell both sides, as if the world is always split in two. At the same time, 'reality' in America has become synonymous with the rank and the sordid. We've fetishized the true story, the tell-all confession, reality TV, real people in their real lives, celebrity marriages, divorces, addictions, humiliation as entertainment - our version of the public hanging. The crowds gathers to gape.

Old places fire the internal weather of our pasts. The mild winds, aching calms, and hard storms of forgotten emotions return to us when we return to the spots where they happened.