What I Loved

by Siri Hustvedt

I suppose we are all the products of our parents’ joy and suffering. Their emotions are written into us, as much as the inscriptions made by their genes.

Like everyone, Bill rewrote his life. The recollections of an older man are different from those of a young man. What seemed vital at forty may lose its significance at seventy. We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die.

I turned on the television to hear voices. I turned it off to get rid of them.