…. who is aged 76 is a prolific, popular and critically acclaimed author of fiction for both children and adults. Quoted in today’s ‘Observer, she says that chronologies irritate her. ‘There is no chronology inside my head… The pack of cards I carry around is forever shuffled and re-shuffled; there is no sequence, everything happens at once’.
The thoughts she has given to one of her characters have become her own. ‘The machines of the new technology, I understand, perform in much the same way: all knowledge is stored, to be summoned up at a flick of a key. They sound, in theory, more efficient. Some of my keys don’t work; others demand pass-words, codes, random unlocking sequences. The collective past, curiously, provided these. It is public property, but it is also deeply private. We all look differently at it. My Victorians are not your Victorians. My seventeenth century is not yours…The signals of my own past come from the received past. The lives of others slot into my own life.
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This is very near to my own experience. I find this movement from one thought to another – the links sometimes apparent but often inexplicable – can be refreshing; occasionally disturbing, especially when I am reminded of things I would prefer to forget. Why have I remembered that particular incident, I wonder? Why of all the important things that have happened to me, why has this or that tiny fragment of memory remained to refresh or sometimes to plague me? I watched on TV last night a wonderful Promenade concert from the Royal Albert Hall in London. As a young man I was often in the audience, night after night. Last night I didn’t only watch. I was there!
I find Penelope Lively’s insights very helpful. ‘In old age’ she says, you realise that while you you’re divided from your youth by decades, you can close your eyes and summon it at will.
’ I wonder if others have this experience as I do. Putting the years of our life in order is often an impossible ambition, but in Lively’s terms, shuffling the pack of cards to evoke the good years of our lives is one of the rich gifts of age.
Bryan
