MEMENTOES’ MEMOIRS
Painting: El Greco, El soplón (Boy Blowing on a Taper)
Photograph: Fritz Eschen, Girl with Blowing Bubble, 1947
From experience, both our own as well as our precursors’, our colleague writers’, we can affirm that in dialogues within narration there are three thorny, controversial issues: the world of the child, the world of the drunk, and the world of the phoney or talentless man. None of these three has ever been expressed authentically, and memories play tricks on everyone. With respect to such matters, we all have our own views – you see, we do not remember ourselves as children, we have no recollections of ourselves being drunk, and we never admit that we’re phoney or talentless. “That’s not how children talk”, “That’s not how children think” – that’s the most common criticism one receives whenever one is attempting to depict a child’s point of view. […] Life’s blows have caught “grown-ups” in such a nasty way that “grown-ups” don’t have the courage anymore to be as serious as children. If they ever realised this, they’d be seriously disheartened, disarmed, and debilitated. Maybe that barrier in our memory, that prevents us from remembering ourselves as children, is a nature thing after all?
Andrei Bitov, Pushkin House (translated by Colouringreflections)
Music: Jean Françaix, L’Heure du Berger (suggested interpretation: Kammervereinigung Berlin)
















