Reclaiming memories

top of the blog plug: I wrote about the attempts to erode direct democracy last week for The New Republic. Read it here.

And now, a photo of Shanendoah valley and some words

credit: emertz76/flickr

The recently-deceased Czech writer Milan Kundera had this idea about memories and places — that we intentionally seek out physical places where we have memories in an effort to reclaim the memories we left there. In the novel where he builds this notion, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, a character goes on a sort of pilgrimage to reclaim memories of her dead husband. It’s a sappy notion but A.) that’s the kind of writer Kundera is and B.) I think maybe, it’s kind of true.

I don’t mean to say that chasing down old memories is a primary driver of human energies. But I do think, subconsciously, we might occasionally go somewhere because we have ties of remembrance to that place. Maybe we don’t go there to reclaim a memory, but maybe we go there to confront it. And maybe the desire to confront a memory and the desire to reclaim it are dancing to the same tune.¹

I kept thinking about Kundera’s theory over the weekend because, for the first time in five or six years, I went to Shenandoah with my whole big family. Shenandoah, for those of you unfamiliar, is a national park in the Appalachian mountains. Technically, it’s in Virginia but the mountains are hundreds of millions of years older than the state of Virginia, so it seems to me that they’ve got more claim to the land. The Appalachian Mountains will be there long after Virginia is a forgotten notion.

Anyway, my family has been camping in Shenandoah twice-a-year since before I was born. So I have a lot of memories of the place. And I wanted to go back for two reasons — A.) I wanted to revisit those memories and B.) I want my own kid, who is now 19-months-old to have some of those same memories.