If there is nothing that needs correcting in the world memory, the only thing left to do is to correct reality where it doesn't agree with that memory.

His memory, if he could patiently reconstruct the hours he passed, second by second, promised him boundless Edens.

His memory, if he could patiently reconstruct the hours he had passed, second by second, promised him boundless Edens.

The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand

I continue to gaze into the valley bottom of the memory. And my fear now is that as soon as a memory forms it immediately takes on the wrong light, mannered, sentimental as war and youth always are, becomes a piece of narrative written in the style of the time, which can't tell us how things really were but only how we thought we saw them, thought we said them. I don't know if I am destroying the past or saving it, the past hidden in that besieged village.