It is true that countless facades of the city stand exactly as they stood in my childhood. Yet I do not encounter my childhood in their contemplation. My gaze has brushed them too often since, too often they have been in the décor and theatre of my walks and concerns.

...the images of my metropolitan childhood perhaps are capable, at their core, of preforming later historical experience’ .

Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.

Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.

To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it "the way it really was"...It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.