In Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Queen Jocasta mentions the CROSSROADS where her first husband was murdered, leading her new spouse, Oedipus, to remember that he had once killed a man at the same spot. “What memories, what wild tumult of the soul,” he responds, “came over me, lady, as I heard you speak!”.
As Helga Crane, the protagonist of Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, recovers from GIVING BIRTH, she hovers “for a long time somewhere in that delightful borderland on the edge of unconsciousness” where “she could watch the figures of the past drift by… It was refreshingly delicious, this immersion in the past.”
Hit by a GRENADE during the Battle of Borodino in Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Prince Andrey flits in and out of consciousness as he recalls “all the best and happiest moments of his life, especially his earliest childhood, when he had been undressed and put to bed, when his nurse had sung lullabies over him, when, burying his head in the pillows, he had felt happy in the mere consciousness of life…not like the past even, but as though it were the actual present.”
“I was really angry,” says the narrator of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend upon learning that her childhood friend had carefully cut herself out of every FAMILY PHOTOGRAPH before disappearing. “I turned on the computer and began to write—all the details of our story, everything that still remained in my memory.”
“The brain doesn’t like being typecast,” muses the aging narrator of Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending after getting back in touch with AN OLD GIRLFRIEND, which causes forgotten memories to resurface. “Just when you think everything is a matter of decrease, of subtraction and division, your brain, your memory, may surprise you. As if it’s saying: Don’t imagine you can rely on some comforting process of gradual decline.”
In Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, the Ghost of Christmas Past whisks Ebenezer Scrooge out of the city to a SNOWY COUNTRY ROAD, where the miser finds himself “conscious of a thousand odors floating in the air, each one connected with a thousand thoughts, and hopes, and joys, and cares long, long, forgotten!”
