[Bookworm_Girl]

I read in a book this morning a discourse that memory is fluid and shifting and is not static like viewing a collection of snapshots in an album. It contained this statement below.

The Russian literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin wrote that each memory consists not only of itself but of all subsequent recollections of it.

It made me think of the following quotes from Nora regarding the mutability of her memories. We all must doubt at times the reliability of our memories from the passage of time, from the aggregate of our life experiences affecting our views, from the overlay of people telling us their perspectives of what happened at the same event, etc.

I consider regret, even shock at the realization of how we had wasted each other. And because I can still ask the question, I must ask another. Have I given an accurate account of Colin Porteous, or have I merely provided another substitute? At number six our speculation on the roses always ended in laughter...

Perhaps the real man has been so overscored by laughter that he will never be retrieved. As a rule, when we can’t find even one good quality in a person, we are prejudiced, and by that rule I must admit my prejudice.

Yet her memories of Arch stay in the dark side and aren't revisited in discussions at number six.

But I never did so, and Arch stayed on the dark side, and now I can be glad that he was never overlaid by the discussion, speculation, and humour that will always bring uncertainty to my view of Colin Porteous.

I liked this quote near the ending.

My globe of memory is in free spin, with no obscure side, and although at times in its swelling and spinning it offers the queer suggestion that imagination is only memory at one, or two, or twenty, removes, my interest now is in repudiating, or in trying to repudiate, those removes, even if it ends by my finding something only as small as a stone lying on pale grass.