Memory Wall

by Anthony Doerr

photograph taken on the very night when Harold and Alma seemed to reach the peak of everything they could be.

Flesh washing away, minerals penetrating bones, the weight of millennia piling up, bodies becoming rock.

its tiny body seems to Imogene like the distillation of a dozen generations, Sondra’s mother’s mother’s mother, an entire pedigree stripped into a single flame and stowed still burning inside the blue tributaries of veins pulsing beneath its skin.

Of understanding that the line of descendancy is not continuous but arbitrary. That in every genealogy someone will always be last: last leaf on the family tree, last stone in the family plot.

Stretchmarks, baby formula, stroller brands; if you’re listening for something, it’s all you’ll hear.

Nothingness is the permanent thing. Nothingness is the rule. Life is the exception.

But it makes as much sense, I think, as watching your Mom and Dad get buried in boxes in the mud.

How do we know we aren’t continually traveling inward, toward our centers? Because this is how it feels to Esther when she sits on her deck in Geneva, Ohio, in the last spring of her life; it feels as if she is being drawn down some path that leads deeper inside, toward a miniature, shrouded, final kingdom that has waited within her all along.

Every hour, Robert thinks, all over the globe, an infinite number of memories disappear, whole glowing atlases dragged into graves. But during that same hour children are moving about, surveying territory that seems to them entirely new. They push back the darkness; they scatter memories behind them like bread crumbs. The world is remade.

how the world continually drains itself of young men, leaving behind only objects—empty tobacco pouches, bladeless jackknives, salt-caked trousers—mute, incapable of memory.