George Raptis
Personal Essay
Memories are a strange thing to hold on to. They are impossible to recall in moments of need, yet unexpectedly float into ordinary moments of the day. Recently, I wasn’t able to tell a friend why the scratchy strings of a song playing on the radio sounded so familiar. But on my routine walk to the bus stop, the earthy smell of figs reminded me of the dry hills near where my grandparents grew up. Memories can be unreliable. In her essay titled ‘A Sketch of the Past,’ Virginia Woolf conceives of life as a bowl that one fills and fills until it is brimming with memories. Within this soupy mess, Woolf draws a distinction between moments of being and non-being. Moments of being are exceptional. They stand out in our minds because of the blunt force with which they hit us. Woolf eloquently describes the “sudden violent shock” she feels in her adulthood at the sight of an apple tree, because it reminds her that a friend of her parents had killed himself on a holiday in St Ives. There was a sudden darkness she felt, even as a child, after hearing of a life cut short at the stump.
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