Memory Palace
July 9, 2008
The book I’m reading, The Madonnas of Leningrad, is set partly in Leningrad during the German seige of 1941. Marina is a docent at the Hermitage museum, and she and others prepare for the advancing German army by packing away the paintings for safekeeping. Only the empty frames remain on the walls. Later, to mentally escape the terror of the German bombing raids, she begins to recreate a “memory palace” in her mind, filled with the missing paintings which she remembers in painstaking detail.
This has me thinking about memory – the way that certain images or sounds can trigger powerful memories seemingly out of the blue. For me, I’ve always thought about certain songs and books as being part of a lengthy “soundtrack” to my life. All of high school was set to R.E.M and The Smiths. Any 10,000 Maniacs song puts me instantly back on Martha’s Vineyard in the summer of 1988. (I can even picture the tape case, which always had some gritty sand inside of it.) My drive across the country when I moved to California will forever be associated with reading Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose. Cormac McCarthy = my first apartment; John Banville’s The Sea = Lila’s first days home from the hospital. And on and on.
What’s on your soundtrack?
