Down Memory Lane

The Air House was on the south side of the big Van Riebeek Square, next to an eighteenth-century Residency which housed a department of the Ministry of Public Health.

Eric Ambler: The Night-Comers

Right there, in my mind's eye, there was a picture of the big square. It had various buildings all around it and beyond them there were large fields. But why fields? Hadn't I read in the previous paragraph that the square was in the midst of a city of a million and a half? So beyond the square there had to be other buildings, perhaps even plain houses, but no fields. I quickly backtracked to the previous paragraph. Yes, it was just as I had thought. What was going on here? Why was the author saying one thing and I was imagining another? I was under the impression that the author's words set-up a sort of framework on which our imagination builds a picture based on our experiences. But here I had built a picture that was definitely different from the one described. Was my imagination so wild that even the author whose words I was reading couldn't restrain it? Or was I changing the story I was reading to something of my own?

As I read on, I payed careful attention to exactly what I imagined and what the author said. Soon enough, city streets and buildings replaced the fields around the main square. In the last chapters of the book I travelled in a military jeep from the main square through a large section of the city while a military entanglement had just stopped by a cease fire. So my imagination was tamed by the author's words. And yet, what I had first imagined in my mind's eye was inaccurate, and later, the fictional Indonesian city's streets I had made-up highly resembled my own Canadian neighbourhood when I was much younger.

And then it stroke me. Quickly I checked my book-list to see when I had first read The Night-Comers. Sure enough, I was of high-school age. Apart from Canadian houses in an Indonesian city, the soldiers in the story seemed to be carrying weapons that looked like those my dad had described from his experiences in the Second World War. Were the images in my mind's eye during my second reading of the book coming from those I had made up in my first reading forty years earlier? It sounded far-fetched but it made sense. I next read John Wyndham's The Chrysalids, a book I hadn't touched since I was in grade 10. Sure enough, even though the story was in an unspecified country after an atomic war, in my mind's eye I saw the fields and buildings outside my grandfather's house!

When an author writes a book, he takes the images of his fertile imagination and changes them into words. When you read a book, you change the author's words back into images. Your images can only be built from your personal experiences. So there is no way that the author's images can ever match your own. Two different people—two different personalities—living on different parts of the world with different experiences will imagine two different things. When someone makes a movie out of a book you've read, even if the movie has kept close to the book, what you will see on the screen will be quite different from what you had imagined. What was filmed could only be what the film and art-directors had imagined.

If you read a book when you are young, your collection of images from the world is small. Invariably, the book's setting and characters is limited to your particular surroundings and experiences at the time. If you now put the book aside for many years and reread it when you are much older, your imagination probably won't bother constructing new images. Because of the way our memory operates, as you reread the same words, they will simply trigger the older images from your memory and bring them forward. Like me, you will find yourself in old neighbourhoods, visit grandpa and notice that your grumpy old neighbour was the bad guy. When you reread a book you haven't touched since you were a youngster, you will do more than take a trip down memory lane. You will ultimately rediscover the younger you.

So why were there fields surrounding the large square of the main city in my mind's eye? Chances are I had misread or missed altogether a couple of sentences in the previous paragraph and painted a wrong image. It was no big deal because I corrected it as I read on.

Now-days things like telephone calls distract us. Back then, I would put my money on a pretty girl!