One may be born with the potential for a prodigious memory, but one is not born with a disposition to recollect; this comes only with the changes and separations in life -separations from people, from places, from events, and situations, especiailly if they had been of great significance, have been deeply hated or loved. It is, thus, discontinuities, the great discontinuities in life, that we seek to bridge, or reconcile, or integrate by recollection, and , beyond this, by myth and art. Discontinuity and nostalgia are most profound if, in growing up, we leave or lose the palce where we were born and spent our childhood, if we become expatriates or exiles, if the place, or the life, we were brought up in is changed beyond recognition or destroyed. All of us, finally we are exiles from the past…’
( Olver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars)
‘Why is it , that with poor David, a sense comes always crushing on me now, when I fall into low spirits, as of one happiness I missed in life, and one friend and companion I have never made…’ ( Dickens on David Copperfield)
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