Memory

The landscape of my childhood is being redrawn: what were firm strokes of the pen outlining clear shapes filled with strong colour are gradually fading. What used to be in sharp focus in the shallow field of my infancy has lost its definition. I feel more and more distant from the static pictures that populate my memory.

These images seem almost like those sepia vignettes that you can find in some Victorian books: fading out towards the edges, like little islands of coherence surrounded by misty fraying. The colour and movement in those monochrome depictions comes not only from pushing memory for the sensory information to animate your past life, but also from those who knew you who add the telling detail; the defining anecdote; the hidden link; the music of the moment which breathes life into a half understood early response.

The more I speak to my relatives the more I hear and understand. Each view of a fugitive event: a sight, sound, taste, emotion gains immeasurably from the perspective of an adult, viewing and explaining sometimes fifty years after the event. Sometimes the perception is not merely a piece of a jigsaw, filling in an otherwise blank space in a partially completed frame, but rather a piece from an entirely different puzzle. Casual reminiscences; conversations; photographs; books; letters: all part of the magic of creation which accompanies knowledge in depth and though time linking personal experience.

It was my uncle’s funeral today. Another link gone; another active, vital, articulate, intelligent man now only kept in memory; but a man who, because of his touching of so many lives, will be kept in a multitude of memories.

The religious content of the funeral was limited; the dynamic of the service was taken up with a series of addresses and readings. I was moved by the obvious emotion of those who were speaking about their links with my uncle. The range of memory covered more than fifty years of his life.

My contribution to the service was to read an extract from Meditation XVII by John Donne; something that I read in my father’s funeral and a piece of writing to which I respond strongly.

Funerals are rarely uplifting events, but this one seemed to satisfy people as being fitting for my uncle and passionate in its assessment of the character of the man who has gone.

I can think of no more suitable memorial to my uncle than to reprint the reading from Donne. (The selection, editing and punctuation of the extract are my own.)

AN EXTRACT FROM MEDITATION XVII BY JOHN DONNE

The church is universal. So are all her actions. All that she does belongs to all.

When she buries a man: that action concerns me.

All mankind is of one author, and is one volume.

When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated;

God employs several translators.

Some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation,

And his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were.

Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind,

And therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls.

It tolls for thee.