While reading James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I was impressed by Joyce's ability to capture memory. Reading the book is like experiencing someone's recollection of events instead of the straightforward retelling of them in chronological order.
What can really be said about the truth of childhood memory? I was transported back to some no-when where I slept on the shag brown carpet with berber patterns that smelled of dust and wind-blown dirt for tilled pot-diluvian fields in my grandparent's farmhouse basement. It was dark and winter-cold, the disheveled and tinsel-laden Christmas tree aglow in soft light by the stairwell of the suspended stairs that dropped sand in our eyes when someone treads upon them. The soft glow of Christmas hope, the cold dark of winter death in the corners, the smell of dust and dirt in our nostrils.
What were we doing there is a fact beyond my memory. I'm not even sure whether it was December or even winter, but the imagery of the memory is there, meshed and blended with the panorama of that time. Making what I remember and what I imagined justly true in my mind's eye.
The blend of fact and fantasy, memory and imagination is the experience of all people. This blending and immersive experience is what makes Joyce so fun to read. We make an excursion into the fluidity of our own memory and being that causes us to consider that who we are and who we think we are, are closer and more interrelated then we think.
