You do not describe the past by writing about old things, but by writing about the haze that exists between yourself and the past. I write about the way my present brain wraps around my brains of smaller and smaller crania, of bones and cartilage and membrane. . . the tension and discord between my present mind and my mind a moment ago, my mind ten years ago. . . their interactions as they mix with each other’s images and emotions. There’s so much necrophilia in memory! So much fascination with ruin and rot! It’s like being a forensic pathologist, peering at liquefied organs!
—Mircea Cărtărescu, Blinding, translated by Sean Cotter
What interests me most in this passage is the tension between memory as decay and memory as transformation. Reading Cărtărescu’s Blinding, I am reminded of Augustine’s description of time as a series of vanishing instants, each erasing and folding into the next. To recall the past is not to retrieve it intact, but to recompose it from fragments, distorted by each passing moment.
There is a peculiar violence in this act, a necessary falsification that keeps memory alive by refusing to leave it static. I find this thought quietly unsettling, particularly as I read toward Cărtărescu’s Solenoid, a novel said to turn even more inward, toward the labyrinths of perception and recollection. In both cases, memory is not a treasure hoarded against time, but a shifting landscape, disordered and alive.