Private Literature

Earlier today, I came across an Aldous Huxley quote I particularly liked: "Every man's memory is his private literature." I'm not sure which I initially liked best, the idea of literature being mined from memory or the concept of "private literature". The more I thought about the statement, I realized Huxley had, of course, meant both things are one.

Even among the most outwardly unexceptional people, all lives trace a story. Some contain more characters than one can easily track, others follow plot lines that can only be described as convoluted. Some are full of description where nothing seems to happen, unless you're patient enough to read between the lines. I'm not sure writers can create anything meaningful without the work being influenced and shaped by some person, place, or thing in their past. Memory is so often synonymous with inspiration, even if it's the recollection of something heard, seen or read.

"...private literature." Never entirely private, is it? Almost everything we've experienced has been a shared event, even the once-forgotten moments that play back clearly and unexpectedly in our minds. I know that in my "private literature" collection of memory, there are some amazingly poignant stories waiting to be told. And, in some cases, the stories will never materialize. They come from shared libraries and cannot be borrowed without special permission. Like an ancient manuscript, some moments are too fragile to touch. Best to leave them on a high shelf, both acknowledged and undisturbed.

Fortunately, there still remains much to be revisited and reworked and rewritten until it becomes something new on its own terms. I think of some of my migratory paths: From an idyllic childhood in Buffalo, New York to being greeted daily by the doorman at our apartment building in Washington, D.C. to trudging through deep snow in a remote town in the north woods of Wisconsin to Philadelphia to a small city in the South.

I consider the people I've known from so many walks of life, on such different career tracks, holding varied beliefs and motivations. There are the moments that felt frozen in time as they happened, from the across-the-room realization that my then-boyfriend would be the man I'd eventually marry to the phone call telling me my mother had died an hour earlier in a car accident. There are the highs and lows that make up cherished friendships and the expansive reach of family. Memory can be like an endless web that starts with one experience, then continues to include all who had been a part of it and their individual pasts. And everyone's private literature contains stories worth telling.